AUSTRALIA-WIDE LOW FLAT RATE $9.90
Flora Thompson was born in 1876 in Juniper Hill in Oxfordshire, the rural hamlet that she describes in Lark Rise. She was a bookish child who dreamt of being a writer. Her mother taught her to read before she started at the village school. She left school at fourteen to work as an assistant postmistress. She married in 1903 and moved to Bournemouth where she started writing her famous trilogy in her 60s. The three books were published between 1939 and 1943. Thompson died in 1947.
Thompson's timing was perfect. The Second World War was looming and Englishness was being redefined in the face of modernity. -- Alice Spawls * London Review of Books * Lark Rise to Candleford is remarkable for its celebratory realism. It neither romanticises poverty nor underplays it -- Richard Mabey * Guardian *
