‘ILLUSTRATED LARK RISE TO CANDLEFORD, THE’

Flora Thompsons trilogy Lark Rise to Candleford is one of the best-loved of all books about the English countryside. It was published forty years ago and the past it describes is now a century away. Yet it remains perhaps the most vivid detailed and immediate portrait of country life ever written. Flora Thompson herself was a cottage child born in 1878 and brought up in poverty in the tiny Oxfordshire hamlet of Juniper. (Juniper is renamed Lark Rise in the book and Flora calls herself Laura.) From the age of five to when she left school at twelve she and her brothers and sisters walked each day the three miles to Cottisford (Fordlow) where her teacher Miss Holmes used to say Oh Laura! What a dunce you are! But Miss Holmes was wrong for Flora possessed the literary gifts the eye and memory for everyday detail and the intimacies of experience which would one day combine to produce this gentle masterpiece. In the 1880s the countryside was on the brink of unalterable change and the march of progress would soon wipe away the unique idiosyncrasies of a centuries-old way of life. But Flora Thompson was born in time to capture it before it vanished for ever with her unforgettable gallery of characters – Old Sally Miss Lane the postmistress Sir Timothy Miss Macey and the rest – and her unsentimental but deeply affectionate account of the humble details of the life she knew.