Lark Rise to Candleford

Lark Rise to Candleford captures a piece of social history in this ever popular fictional account of an English rural upbringing between the wars. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful hardbacks make perfect gifts for book lovers, or wonderful additions to your own collection. This edition contains all three books – Lark Rise, Over to Candleford and Candleford Green, with an introduction by Bill Gallagher, screenwriter of the hugely popular BBC television adaptation.Laura Timms spends her childhood in a country hamlet called Lark Rise. An intelligent and enquiring child, she is always attentive to the way of life around her – the lives of a farming community and nature as it transforms through the seasons, their working lives together and their celebrations. Whilst much is to be admired and cherished about her community, when she looks back on it as an adult she doesn’t shy away from describing hardship too. Laura attends the village school and leaves at the age of fourteen to work for the postmistress of the village of Candleford. There her eyes are opened to wider horizons.

Lark Rise to Candleford is remarkable for its celebratory realism. It neither romanticises poverty nor underplays it, Thompson’s timing was perfect. The Second World War was looming and Englishness was being redefined in the face of modernity.

Flora Thompson was born in 1876 in Juniper Hill in Oxfordshire, the rural hamlet that she describes in Lark Rise. She was a bookish child who dreamt of being a writer. Her mother taught her to read before she started at the village school. She left school at fourteen to work as an assistant postmistress. She married in 1903 and moved to Bournemouth where she started writing her famous trilogy in her 60s. The three books were published between 1939 and 1943. Thompson died in 1947.