Flora Thompson
Flora Thompson (1876-1947) was an English author best known for her semi-autobiographical trilogy, which includes "Lark Rise," "Over to Candleford," and "Candleford Green." Born the eldest of ten children in a working-class family, her early life was marked by a limited formal education, supplemented by her uncle's encouragement to read. Thompson's career began in rural post offices, where she gained valuable experiences and interactions that would later inform her writing. She married fellow postal worker John Thompson, and together they raised three children.
Thompson's literary journey took a significant turn after winning a writing competition in 1912, which led to a long-lasting friendship with the poet Ronald Campbell Macfie, who inspired her to publish her work. Throughout her life, she wrote extensively about nature and rural life, capturing the essence of a bygone era. Her trilogy, characterized by the character Laura as her alter ego, reflects her childhood experiences and observations of rural England. Thompson's last work, "Still Glides the Stream," was completed shortly before her death, and her unpublished works are preserved at the University of Texas, ensuring her legacy as an important voice in English literature.
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Subject Terms
Flora Thompson
Fiction Writer and Poet
- Born: December 5, 1876
- Birthplace: Juniper Hill, Oxfordshire, England
- Died: May 21, 1947
- Place of death: Brixham, South Devon, England
Biography
Flora Thompson was born in 1876, the eldest of ten children, of whom six survived infancy. Her father, Albert Timms, son of a master builder, was a skilled but discontented stonemason who remembered better days; her mother, Emma Lapper Timms, was of peasant stock. Thompson was closest to her brother Edwin, who died in World War I, and her sister May.
From age five through twelve, the Timms children walked to the village school in Cottisford, England, where the memorization of scripture was emphasized. That was the extent of Thompson’s formal education, fortunately supplemented by visits to her uncle Recab Holland, a book-loving Buckingham shoemaker who encouraged her to read aloud to him. A working-class “cottage child,” Thompson would ordinarily have entered domestic service as soon as she left school. However, in view of her love of reading, her mother gave her two more years of freedom and placed her as an assistant to Mrs. Whitton, postmistress of Fringford. The postal service, requiring long country walks, proved a good occupation for the future writer, and Thompson worked in a series of rural post offices, always living with the postmistress or postmaster’s family, until she encountered the postmaster of Grayshott. His behavior was such that Thompson bravely moved out on her own in 1901; he murdered his wife and child later that year.
Grayshott was becoming a writers’ colony. Thompson saw Arthur Conan Doyle, Richard Le Gallienne, and George Bernard Shaw in her post office, but they scarcely saw her. She married John Thompson, also a postal worker, and they lived in Bournemouth from 1903 to 1916. The couple had three children, Winifred, Basil, and Peter; Peter’s death early in World War II devastated Thompson’s health.
Her first published writing, a secretly written essay on Jane Austen, won a prize in a women’s magazine. The remuneration justified her writing openly, and she produced numerous “sugared” stories for the women’s market to finance her children’s education. A turning point came in 1912, with the sinking of the Titanic. A Scottish physician and poet, Ronald Campbell Macfie, published an ode on the disaster in The Literary Monthly and a competition was held for best commentary on the ode. Thompson won, and Macfie determined to meet her. The homebound Thompson and handsome gadabout Macfie became soul mates until his death in 1931; he encouraged her to publish her only volume of poetry, Bog- Myrtle and Peat (1921).
For eight years, living in rural Liphook, Thompson published nature essays in The Catholic Fireside, a small magazine. She formed the Peverel Society, a correspondence club of aspiring writers, whom she shepherded. The beauty of Dartmouth, where the Thompsons moved in 1928, nurtured her gifts to fruition. In 1937, she published a childhood reminiscence, “Old Queenie;” “May Day” appeared in the Fortnightly Review, and the Oxford University Press asked her to develop a book. The result was the novel Lark Rise, published to great acclaim in 1939, followed by Over to Candleford (1941) and Candleford Green (1943). Throughout the trilogy, the character of Laura serves as Thompson’s alter ego. She finished her last tribute to a vanished way of life, Still Glides the Stream, just before her death in 1947. Her unpublished archive is at the University of Texas.