Thompson, Flora

Flora Thompson (1876-1947), writer, was born Flora Jane Timms, the daughter of stonemason Albert and his wife Emma of Juniper Hill on the Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire border. She left school at fourteen to work in the village post office at Fringford. After marrying, she and her husband John William Thompson moved first to Bournemouth, where she won a magazine essay competition in 1911. From 1916, the couple ran the post office in Liphook, Hampshire, where she began to write in earnest (both literary essays and nature articles). In 1921, she published her first volume of verse, Bog Myrtle and Peat . From 1925 to the outbreak of the Second World War, she ran a postal writers' circle called the Peverel Society, and was also editor of The Seasons . In 1928, the family moved to Devon. Her acclaimed autobiographical trilogy, Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), and Candleford Green (1943) was reissued as Lark Rise to Candleford in 1945. She also contributed to The National Review, Countryman, Queen and Lady . Her last book, Still Glides the Stream was published post-humously in 1948. She died at her home in Brixham, Devon, and is buried in Longcross Cemetery, Dartmouth, Devon.

Arthur Ball was a member of the Peverel Society, and his wife Anna was also a writer. At first, the couple became correspondents of Thompson, and later became personal friends. They lived in Stroud, Gloucestershire.