Flora Thompson

Flora Jane Thompson was born in 1876 at Juniper Hill, a hamlet on the borders of Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire. After leaving school she was sent as assistant to the postmistress (who also kept the forge) at a town eight miles away, and was for some time employed to carry the letters in a locked leather bag to the big house near by. So began her long connection with the Post Office. She married young and her husband later became a postmaster. His work took them to Bournemouth, where she obtained from the public library the Greek and Roman classics in translation, as well as Ibsen and the English poets, novelists and critics - especially Shaw and Yeats. Her first book was a collection of poems, Bog Myrtle and Peat. However, she is best remembered for three autobiographical volumes: Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941) and Candleford Green (1943), reissued in one volume as Lark Rise to Candleford (1945). A fourth volume, Still Glides the Stream, was published posthumously in 1948. Flora Thompson died at Brixham, Devon on 21 May 1947.

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