Flora Thompson

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Flora Jane Thompson
Born Flora Jane Timms
(1876-12-05)5 December 1876
Juniper Hill, Oxfordshire, England
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Brixham, Devon, England
Resting place Longcross Cemetery, Dartmouth, Devon, England
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Employer Post office
Known for Author and poet
Notable work Lark Rise to Candleford
Spouse(s) John William Thompson
Children 2 sons and a daughter

Flora Jane Thompson (5 December 1876 – 21 May 1947) was an English novelist and poet famous for her semi-autobiographical trilogy about the English countryside, Lark Rise to Candleford.

Early life and family

She was born in Juniper Hill in northeast Oxfordshire, the eldest child of Albert Timms and Emma Dipper, a stonemason and nursemaid respectively. Albert and Emma had twelve children, but only six survived childhood.[1] Her favourite brother, Edwin, was killed near Ypres in 1916.[2] Flora was educated at the parish school in Cottisford and was described as 'altogether her father's child'.[3]

Flora worked in various post offices in southern England. The first of these was Fringford, a village about 4 miles (6.4 km) northeast of Bicester. Flora started work here in 1891, as assistant to the postmistress, Mrs. Kezia Whitton.[4][5] Among other post offices where Flora worked was that at Grayshott in Hampshire and Yateley in Hampshire, and she later moved to Bournemouth. In 1903 she married John William Thompson at Twickenham Parish Church,[6] with whom she had a daughter, Winifred Grace (1903) and two sons, Henry Basil (1909) and Peter Redmond (1918)[7] (later lost at sea in 1941[8]).

Literary output

Flora, was a self-taught writer and a largely self-educated woman, and as early as 1922 was thinking about writing of her childhood .[9] In 1911, she won an essay competition in The Ladies Companion for a 300-word essay about Jane Austen.[10] She later wrote extensively, publishing short stories and magazine and newspaper articles. She was a keen self-taught naturalist and many of her nature articles were anthologised in 1986.

Her most famous works are the Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy, which she sent as essays to Oxford University Press in 1938 and which were published soon after. She wrote a sequel thereto Heatherley which was published posthumously along with her other novel Still Glides the Stream in 1948.[11] In Heatherly, which describes Flora's three years in Grayshott at the turn of the 20th century, several of her lifelong interests took shape: the longing for education & culture and to become a writer.[12] All her books are a fictionalised, if autobiographical, social history of rural English life in the late 19th and early 20th century and are now considered classics. H. J. Massingham said of her in 1944 'she possesses the attributes both of sympathetic presentation and literary power to such a degree that her claims can hardly be questioned'.[13] Thompson's essays reveal impressive knowledge of English literature and a gift for writing intelligent but accessible prose for a general audience, approaching novel writing as an artistic process, her greatest poetic gift being lyrical descriptions of nature in prose.[14] Her biographer, Gillian Lindsay, concludes 'this girl whose elementary education was not enough to allow her to take a Civil Service examination, had written a classic book, a piece of enduring literature [15] and Shuckburgh considers it was ' passion and control' that made Flora such a good writer'.[12]

Death

The death of her son during the Second World War affected her deeply and overshadowed the final years of her life.[16] Flora Thompson died in 1947 of a heart attack[6] in Brixham, Devon and is buried at Longcross Cemetery, Dartmouth, Devon. In 1948, her final work, Still Glides the Stream, was published posthumously.[16]

Bibliography

Verse

Novels

Nature articles

References

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Sources

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External links

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  1. ↑ Census Returns of England and Wales, 1911. Kew, Surrey, England: The National Archives of the UK, Class: RG14; Piece: 8177; Schedule Number: 134.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Timms, Betty, More Tales from Lark Rise, The Wychwood Press, Charlbury 2012, ISBN 9781902279459.
  4. ↑ Lindsay, 2007, page not cited
  5. ↑ United Kingdom Census 1881, parish of Fringford
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ CWGC
  9. ↑ Lindsay, Gillian The Story of the Lark Rise Writer Robert Hale Ltd , 1990 ISBN 9781873855539
  10. ↑ Winton Community Forum: Flora Thompson
  11. ↑ Cover note OUP Press Paperbacks, Oxford, ISBN 0192811924
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Introduction, The Peverel Papers - A yearbook of the countryside ed. Julian Shuckburgh, Century Hutchinson London 1986 ISBN 0712612963
  13. ↑ Massingham H.J. (1944), Lark Rise to Candleford, Penguin Books, London 1973, ISBN 9780141037196
  14. ↑ Hoffman, Ruth Collette Without Education or Encouragement - The Literary Legacy of Flora Thompson, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison, 2009, ISBN 9780838642061
  15. ↑ Lindsay, Gillian The Story of the Lark Rise Writer - Robert Hale Ltd , 1990 ISBN 9781873855539
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 http://www.odnb.com/view/article/38059
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