Modern Classics Lark Rise To Candleford by Flora Thompson

The daughter of a self-employed craftsman, Flora grew up in the smallest and poorest of social organizations, the rural hamlet.

So, again, what a gift Flora Thompson offered up in 1939 when she published Lark Rise, her first memoir in what would become a trilogy depicting rural life in Oxfordshire during the 1880s and 90s. But such records, compiled and interpreted by the Big and Middling people, have only a fleeting relationship to the people they reference. The former existence of these people, from whom most of us are descended, are only known to us via the records of the crops they harvested, the roofs they thatched, and the wars they died in. In our academies we learn history from the top down: “Big' people first followed by middling ones who managed to become important, and then the rest - farmers, laborers, servants, and craftsmen who left little more to posterity than their names in parish records and the artifacts we dig up (when we want to build a new road e.g.), catalog, and make stories about. Lark Rise to Candleford, the trilogy of which this novel is a part.What a gift Thompson has bequeathed us.

The novel is neither a straight memoir nor an objective social history, but an imaginary reconstruction of what life felt like to a growing country child in the last years of the 19th century.

Sometimes the viewpoint of adult and child are deliberately played against one another, with a kind of wry dramatic irony'. According to Richard Mabey in his 2014 book Dreams of the Good Life, the author 'tells most of the story as a reminiscing adult, but presents Laura's view when she wants to lighten the tone of an example, or show it through the vivid, unmediated vision of a girl. Laura represents the author Flora Thompson herself, born Flora Timms. It is a part-lyrical, part-documentary portrait of the actual hamlet, Juniper Hill, where the author was born. The novel follows the childhood of Laura Timmins in the small rural northern Oxfordshire hamlet of Lark Rise and the surrounding countryside. In 1945, the book was republished as part of the trilogy Lark Rise to Candleford, comprising the novels Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), and Candleford Green (1943). Lark Rise is a 1939 semi-autobiographical novel by the English author Flora Thompson. (first in the Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy)

Modern Classics Lark Rise To Candleford by Flora Thompson