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Flora THOMPSON
Lark Rise to Candleford: A Trilogy by Flora Thompson
David R. Godine 01/2009[I] ~Introduction by H.J. Massingham. Wood engravings by Julie Neild~ 1st Edition
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Paperback ~ 235 x 175 mm. 576pp ~ Nonpareil Book. Published: January 2009

Flora Thompson (1876-1947) wrote what may be the quintessential distillation of English country life at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1945, the three books Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), and Candleford Green (1943) were published together in one elegant volume, and this new omnibus Nonpareil edition, complete with charming wood engravings, should be a cause for real rejoicing.

In his introduction, H. J. Massingham observes that Thompson 'possesses the attributes both of sympathetic presentation and literary power to such a degree of quality and beauty that her claims upon posterity can hardly be questioned'. He calls the books themselves 'a triune achievement: a triumph of evocation in the resurrecting of an age that, being transitional, was the most difficult to catch as it flew; another in diversity of rural portraiture engagingly blended with autobiography; and the last in the overtones and implications of a set of values which is the author's "message" '.

This is the story of three closely-related Oxfordshire communities - a hamlet, a village, and a town - and the memorable cast of characters who people them. Based on her own experiences as a child and young woman, it is keenly observed and beautifully narrated, quiet and evocative. The books have inspired two plays that ran in London, and a new ten-part BBC-TV drama series to be broadcast in the U.S. in 2009.

'Our literature has no finer remembrancer ... no observer so genuinely endearing' - John Fowles, New Statesman

'Flora Thompson's great memoir of her Oxfordshire girlhood [is] a model of the form. The richness of the language, the lingering over detail and incident creates a haunting classic' - The New York Times

Flora Thompson was born in 1876 in a hamlet in Oxfordshire. Her first job was an assistant to the postmistresses in a town eight miles away. She married young, and her husband became a postmaster. Her first book was a collection of poems, but she is best remembered for her three autobiographical novels which became the Lark Rise trilogy. A fourth volume, Still Glides the Stream, was published posthumously in 1948. She died in Devon in 1947.

ISBN: 9781567923636 [Stock #7471]
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