Lark Rise

Lark Rise to Candleford #1

by Flora Thompson

Lark Rise is Flora Thompson's childhood memories of a north Oxfordshire village, the people who lived and worked in it, and a way of life that has totally disappeared. The story is built around Laura and her brother Edmund, through whose eyes are seen "old Sally," whose grandfather built the house she lived in before the enclosure of the heathland, children's games, the interaction of village and gentry, and the way in which the seasons governed life.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical, British Literature, Biography Memoir, Victorian

274 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

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.

Flora benefited from good access to books when the public library opened in Winton, in 1907. Not long after, in 1911, she won an essay competition in The Ladies Companion for a 300-word essay about Jane Austen.[6] 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 Heatherley which was published posthumously. The books are a fictionalised, if autobiographical, social history of rural English life in the late 19th and early 20th century and are now considered minor classics.

Reviews

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh my, this is very good! How have I missed this classic? Categorized as semi-autobiographical fiction, it is full of informative tidbits about Victorian life in a hamlet of Oxfordshire, England. This is not a book about the gentry. It is about ordinary people--men working on farms and women in their homes caring for children, washing and cooking. It is interesting because of its factual detail, but also amusing because of its wry wit. It is special because it is well written.

The fictional hamlet Lark Rise is in reality Juniper Hill, Oxfordshire, England, where the author Flora Thompson (1876 - 1947), née Timms, was born and raised. She writes here of her home environment, having the fictional Laura Timmins tell the story. Laura does not speak with the voice of a child, but as an adult looking back on the first years of her life.

The author had the wisdom to recognize that times were rapidly changing, and that the world of her youth would soon no longer exist—the mechanization of agriculture, urbanization and expansion of public communications would change the world forever. As an adult looking back on her youth, she sees it not merely with wisdom and understanding but also through a lens of ironic humor. She has readers laughing when comparing how people thought and did things back in the 1880s compared to today.

The book is chock-full of historical detail related to housing, food, clothes, festivals, childbirth, child raising and aging, occupations and social behavior of the hamlet’s inhabitants. Although meticulously detailed, the telling is not dry. This is because you also hear what people say to each other, in their own dialect, in their own words. The sayings and the proverbs that pepper the text are as informative as the descriptions of places and things. The stories told one another are drawn as vignettes of villagers' lives.

These people were hardworking, but happy and cheerful. Life was expected to be one of hard knocks. They didn’t expect a whole lot, quite a different attitude from how we are today. It is not implied that times were better back then, but some aspects were good despite widespread poverty. The book mirrors these people’s lives, the good as well as the bad.

I repeat, the book does not read as one of historical fiction, a story with a plot and exciting intrigues. It is less about events of the author’s childhood and more about the community in which she lived. It is a documentation of social history told with humor and flair.

Karen Cass does a fantastic job of reading the audiobook. In a warm, clear voice she captures wonderfully the voices of the old and the young, men and women and the Oxfordshre dialect too. She reads with an understanding of the text, pausing at the right moments and emphasizing the right words. She makes you laugh and smile in all the right places. She delivers a fabulous narration worthy of five stars, and so that is what I am giving it.

I have put everything else aside to read the next in the trilogy.

Thank you, Ruth, for pointing the author and series out to me!

*************

The series:
1.Lark Rise (published 1939) 4 stars
2.Over to Candleford (published 1941) 4 stars
3.Candleford Green (published 1943) 4 stars

In 1945 republished by Oxford University Press in one volume under the title:
Lark Rise to Candleford: A Trilogy

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was thoroughly wonderful and so engaging! It's funny and a bit sad at times and nostalgic and even elegaic because the hamlet life that Laura (Flora) knew as a child was changing even as she herself was growing up. Flora sees Queen Victoria's Jubilee year in 1887 as a real turning point for the community as it lost its rural farming ways and started to see evidence of things happening in the wider world: canned goods from Australia, mechanized farming equipment, a sanitary inspector, etc. The modern world was settling in. But before that, Flora spends 320 pages capturing the life of a rural hamlet in exquisite detail. Well worth a read! I can't wait to start the sequel.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was wonderful. It is difficult, however, to classify this book or describe exactly how or why it was wonderful. What is this book? History? Sociology? Journal? It is many things, and nothing. It contains rich, lush descriptions of various aspects of life in a country hamlet in the 1880s: its mores, its people, its peculiarities, and its place in the world around it and the changing tide of the times.

Fans of the BBC series might be disappointed, or at least confused. This book is not even the same genre as the show - it contains no romantic entanglements, no love triangles, no drama, indeed no plot at all. The "stories" told in this book are no more than a paragraph or two long, and provided as colorful illustrations of the life Ms. Thompson is describing. (It is possible that the plot and drama of the show will be contained in the second two, "Candleford" volumes, which I intend to read next.) Yet the series is completely true to the book - the characters and life are faithful to it, and the series is sprinkled with these vignettes (drawn out to form plot-lines and drama), as well as words, phrases, and thoughts from the text. It was obviously written and produced by those who have read, re-read, dogeared, and loved this book. While I am normally am firmly in the "the book was better" camp, in this case the book and series are two completely different, yet independently awesome, entities.

For anglophiles, lovers of British history, or the history of the family and society, this book is a must-read. How a book can have no plot and yet be completely engrossing is a mystery to me, but Ms. Thompson has pulled it of beautifully.

[Cecily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I, like many others, didn't discover this delightful author until I saw the PBS series 'Lark Rise to Candleford'. I loved that series and how it focused on telling the simple stories of simple people in a small market town and hamlet during the late 19th century in Oxfordshire, England.

Reading Lark Rise was also a delight, though the narrative style is so wildly different than the episodic form of the TV show. Readers of Lark Rise need to come to it understanding that Flora Thompson wrote essays about her life in the hamlet which were eventually turned into the novels we have today. Each chapter covers a specific topic (religion, holidays, men, women, children, gossip) and while you'll recognize some characters and stories from the show, they are not the center of attention. Rather, the author gives us the big picture of what hamlet life was like for her as a little girl.

I found it completely mesmerizing and almost mystical, as if Ms. Thompson had allowed me a peek into a secret, hidden world. The lives of these farm laborers and their families were simple and poverty-ridden, but they could be called happy. I loved learning about them through the eyes of Laura, our small observer who is suppose to represent Flora herself as a child. The beautiful descriptions of the hamlet and surrounding countryside add so much to the cozy other-wordly feeling of the book. The whole thing has a bit of an Anne of Green Gables vibe about it, which is fitting. Same time period, same Commonwealth.

I'm excited to read the next two books.

[Gwynplaine26th · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lo scandire della vita rurale sembra distillato in semplici idilliache immagini, i campi lavorati sotto i raggi caldi della giornata, un cottage alla sera, un uccello in volo all'ultima luce del giorno.

Il romanzo di Flora Thompson ci trasporta nella vita nell'Oxfordshire rurale negli ultimi decenni del 19° secolo, ritraendo un'intera tradizione ancora scandita dai movimenti del sole. Questo finché i vecchi ritmi non soccombono inesorabili al tempo che muta e cominciano a rompersi: gli adolescenti del villaggio partono per lavorare nelle grandi case, iniziano a tornare con innovative idee. 

Tutto sembra evolversi, e la Thompson condensa il concetto in un romanzo di cui, è vero, non si afferra la trama (tecnicamente, non c'è proprio) ma riesce a dipingerci un vivido affresco che resta nel cuore, descrivendo così magnificamente un' Inghilterra perduta da tempo che troviamo perdurare, fervida, viva, in questa sua trilogia. Prossimi due volumi in pubblicazione.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

These memoirs or anecdotes of English village life in the 1880s were enjoyable but lacked a cohesiveness that I had expected from the TV adaptation of "Lark Rise to Candleford". Perhaps that structure or plot is more evident in the other two books of the trilogy...

[Shiloah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored watching the Larkrise to Candleford show with my children as they have been growing up. It is loosely based on the books and now I know why. This first installment in the series is wonderful, but it isn’t an actual story. It’s a history of the English countryside during the Victorian era- late 19th and early 20th century. She includes Laura throughout the connected historical stories—really vignettes or cameos. It was neat to study further and this history with stories is based on the authors life during that timeframe. It makes me love this even more.

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson
10 out of 10


What a joy this magnifique book is to read, especially coming in the footsteps of the cryptic, dystopian, bizarre, otherworldly, outré The Crying of Lot 49 by the recluse, acclaimed Thomas Pynchon - http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/05/t... - and considering that this simple, accessible, classic, conservative – surely long discarded and considered passé by many readers – majestic, enchanting style is the one this reader loves best, offering the occasion for ‘Happiness on very little’, as there is the case for many of the inhabitants of the hamlet that is at the center of this narrative, which comes in three installments, as one of the best loved trilogies of British literature…

This is a sublime description of the countryside in Britain, at the end of the nineteenth century, during the celebrated – in the book they prepare for the Jubilee – queen Victoria – an age during which the under signed would have liked to live, if summoned to make the choice, albeit not as one of the figures in this narrative, not the poor ones anyway, but preferably as one of those lords in possession of a castle, or at the very least a mansion, something like what we see in Downton Abbey, but with less financial, servants and other trouble – when almost all of the men and women who live in the hamlet of juniper Hill (and most likely in most other country places) are quite settled in their ways and do not wish for a change, a revolution – as tends to be the case in this day and age of inequality, but also a young generation that supports socialist or even communist ideas, unaware of that they mean, as we are, those who have been born behind the Iron curtain, beneficiaries of the system brought in by the Soviets…
Not everything is paradisiacal in the hamlet, that is obvious, the bucolic life though does have attractions and made this reader think of his experience when working in tourism and taking clients from the USA – mostly – to live in villages and experience a trip back in time – although most have had quite modern facilities, there were some with an outhouse and conditions closer to the middle ages and what people in Juniper hill had – and later on in the small town of Rosenau, where modernity would sit close to barbarity and my house was on the edge of the forest and thus next to the Wild (indeed, they filmed for the mega production Cold Mountain about three hundred meters from the house, for some of the scenes).

“A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.” Said a very clever man, H.L. Mencken, and this is the case for this story, wherein almost all made just one shilling per week – which was obviously not the same value as today – and anywhere else – on a personal note, living in a gated community, I observed yesterday a new Porsche SUV, parked nearby, in the middle of a pandemic that had wiped out so much wealth – only to hear the spouse stating maliciously (as always) that people in this community are doing very well – the implication was that her husband is a loser and that stealing, as many if not most of these ‘rich goodfellas’ are, would be acceptable, if it comes with a shining new car and the rather flimsy ‘affluence’…positive psychology studies demonstrate that it is much more important to be ‘time affluent’ for instance and that Hedonic Adaptation destroys quite soon the pleasure brought by material gain…the Dalai Lama has entered a supermarket and said …’wow, so many things I do not need ‘hence this Buddhist, or Stoic approach works better.

Rituals of sacrifice, work, events in the life of the men and women are described with divine talent, the stuffing and killing of the poor pigs, the bacon which is hung in a special place, the meat which is given to others, first of all to those who had given sides in their turn, the lack of consideration for the animals – the hunting of foxes is mentioned, poor animals that are torn apart by apparently nice dogs – milk is a rare luxury…indeed, so is water, for it has to be brought from a distance, never mind the running water that Laura, the heroine of the novel, would enjoy so much once she would move, at the tender age of fourteen and a half, together with hot water for a bath…initially, Laura was supposed to become a nurse – and she would be quite upset when she learns she does not fit the requirements – while her brother, Edmund, is meant to be apprenticed to a carpenter, which seems to be a cleaner profession..
As everybody – more or less – has enough to eat, in order to obtain other necessities there Is a need for other sources – or to use the Stoic precept which insists one need to ‘desire only what one already has’ – and they rely in the hamlet on things sent back home by the girls, daughters that are in service, work in the homes or kitchens of richer people and get some second hand clothes and other things to send back home – if one is a cook, one can ask for fifty pounds a year, maybe five more or threaten with resignation, while other servants get much less, but still, ascetic girls manage to send about half their wages back to their mothers, living on very little…the dream of one of the characters is ‘if only I had a pound every week’

As for the aforementioned precept that money – especially those spent on quite useless gadgets most of the time…what is spend on experiences, travel (if possible during a pandemic) provides much better results in terms of increased wellbeing – do not ensure happiness, this is not the case for those who are very poor…for those living in squalor, more money brings in much more happiness, but there are established levels, for instance, in America, it was studied and it was set at about 60 – 70, 000 dollars per year, depending on the state, it is much easier to have a smaller income in Alabama than in San Francisco, the latter is the place where one million dollars buys a one bedroom flat in certain areas…
There are also vagrants in the countryside near Candleford, in Oxfordshire, where all the events take place and they try to sell anything, shoelaces or Lavender…the morals are different from what we have today and if there is tolerance to some degree for children born out of wedlock, men and women still do not want that disgrace to happen to their daughters…small birds, sparrows are caught with a net and put into a pudding, or if fewer caught they are roasted on the fire – one is tempted to say how cruel these people are, but if the pandemic strikes harder, with a second worse wave, who knows what we have to resort to…after all, they say that in North Korea, another communist paradise that socialists and left wingers should take into consideration when they promote those dangerous doctrines, they eat bark…

Eventually, Laura would move to Candleford Green, a place that seems as different as America would be from our lands…but wait, America is now ruled by a savage, has rebellion on the streets and does not look like the Eden we dreamed about…indeed, if I envied my sister for being a doctor in Chicago, now we have to worry about her…

[Mela · Rating 4 out of 5]

The singers were rude and untaught and poor beyond modern imagining; but they deserve to be remembered, for they knew the now lost secret of being happy on little.

The first part of the trilogy wasn't as great as I hoped (especially after first pages). I agree with Leslie: These memoirs or anecdotes of English village life in the 1880s were enjoyable but lacked a cohesiveness. When I was reading one of many reminiscences, I was kidnapped by the story (almost always). But between them was a gap. I would tell, it was a perfect example of why a writer should choose between genre (at least in such cases). It wasn't a well-written fiction because there was no plot. And it wasn't well-written non-fiction too. It would have been perfect as a collection of the short stories.

Rounding up to 4.

More I am going to write in the review of the whole trilogy.

[Brian E Reynolds · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first and longest of Flora Thompson’s three semi-autobiographical novellas that have been most often read in one volume as Lark Rise to Candleford . I had heard that the trilogy was more of a collection of vignettes than a more complexly plotted novel, so I was expecting something in the nature of Gaskell’s tales of a similarly named Cranford.
This book does introduce us to the young girl Laura, the author’s stand-in, and her family, but its primary emphasis and purpose is to introduce the reader to what life was like in the hamlet of Lark Rise in the 1880s when Laura, the author’s stand-in, was a young child.
However, while this book turned out to not be a novel, it also turned out to not be a collection of short-story vignettes like Cranford. The Cranford vignettes have characters you get interested in and tell some form of a story. Lark Rise is really more of a collection of essays about life in the 1880s town that Lark Rise is modeled on, the town the author grew up in. The book is divided into 15 chapter with titles such as “School” ”May Day” and “To Church on Sunday” which talk about what school, May Day rituals and going to church was like in Lark Rise.
Each chapter does contain some very short vignettes of a page or so that are used as examples to assist in portraying certain aspects of that chapter’s subject matter. These vignettes are too short, make no impact on any plot and, except when Laura and family is involved, make no impact on any character development. The vast majority of these vignettes are of other Lark Rise residents, some now dead, that are mentioned once and then not mentioned again.
At first, I found these general details and descriptions of the settings and activities of life in 1880s Lark Rise to be interesting and enriching. I like to read about what life was like at a particular place and time in the past and find it more rewarding to read such social history wrapped in fiction rather than in a drier non-fiction form. However, as the book went on, it started feeling more like a dry non-fiction essay collection than the illuminating and engaging depiction of characters I look for in a good fictional social history. I found myself hoping the narrator might focus on her alter-ego Laura or any character for more than a page total and engage in more storytelling and character building than just general memories of what the processes of life were in this town she grew up in.
While I appreciated the book for the perspective it gave me on life in a late 19th century rural hamlet, this book lacked the dramatic tension or human insights most high quality fiction works contain. It lacked the storytelling and interesting character portrayals that even most good memoirs and non-fiction works have. I rate this warming nostalgic look at a past way of life as 2.7 stars rounded up to 3 stars. I do hope to find some storytelling and character development in the next two novellas of the trilogy which will present life as Laurie moves from the hamlet of Lark Rise to the village of Candleford and then to the market town of Candleford Green.

[Kavita · Rating 5 out of 5]

An autobiographical trilogy, Lark Rise to Candleford follows life in a small hamlet in Southeast England through the eyes of young Laura aka Flora. The first book Lark Rise shows how life was changing in the 1880s and sometimes, the author mentions how things had completely changed by the turn of the century.

As a child of the 1980s, I have seen life changing so completely due to the internet that these small changes seem insignificant today, but nevertheless, for the inhabitants of Lark Rise, they were sufficient to nostalgia about or be thankful about. Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1887 was observed as a major event and heralded the coming of a new age. Though, the real change was coming in the form of the Great War, and many of the young boys we see throughout the book will not return home from the battlefields of Belgium and France.

There were only a handful of families in the hamlet and most of them were poor farmhands or labourers. Laura herself seems to come from a slightly well-off family but not enough that they were kept apart from the rest. The most successful families were those that had girls in service in wealthy or aristocratic households. It's crazy that the families still treasured the boys more despite the girls sending back more money. One wonders what's going to happen to this lifestyle once the large manor houses all break down over the years.

The bucolic and slow life does seem like a different world today and holds the interest of visiting a completely different country and culture. I enjoyed the vivid descriptions of the clothes, food, games, work life, schooling, etc. The narrative went back and forth but did not distract because there is no story. It is just the story of Lark Ford and is covered in all aspects.

Looking forward to reading part 2 of the series!

[Manuel Alfonseca · Rating 3 out of 5]

First part of a famous trilogy (Lark Rise to Candleford), where the author tells her reminiscences about her childhood in a small English hamlet, and speaks in length about the people, the school, the church, the festivities and the way of life.

Interesting to note, she says that in the preceding generation families had about a dozen children, while in the next they went down to about half a dozen.

[Anna Hart · Rating 5 out of 5]

At once lucid and witty social history, and nostalgic elegy resounding with all the haunting chords of melancholy folk songs, Thompson’s prose is infused with the pastoral imagery and melodic lilting of the rustic vernacular spoken by her characters. I say “characters”, but evidently, they are people, preserved with the breathtaking precision of a photograph, yet captured through the most humane of lenses. It records the swan song of human life almost as it must have been for millennia. The popular wisdom contained in this lexicon of antiquated adages is a potent antidote to the soul sickness so characteristic of modern times. It reduced me to tears countless times, including on public transport.

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neither a novel nor a real memoir, as "Laura" the supposed MC only makes sporadic appearances. There is no "plot", no continuity, no real thread as the author skips merrily from spring to harvest to winter to summer in no particular sequence. The book is a long, rambling series of anecdotes about life in an Oxfordshire hamlet (not even a proper village) in "the nineties"--no specific years, no real time-markers until the very end where Queen Victoria's jubilee impinges very slightly on the inhabitants through bunting and commemorative jampots. There's a lot of detail about dress and food and houses and attitudes, but no story. I thought I had read this many years ago but if I did none of it stayed with me--which is not surprising given the lack of cohesive narrative.

That is not to say, however, that it isn't interesting. It is, in a historico-cultural way. I found it a satisfying bedtime "comfort read", but if you're looking for a story, you won't find it here. We aren't even told how old Laura is supposed to be at each appearance. Most of the customs and way of life are coming to an end by the time the novel is set, with no real description of what was coming in their stead, which made the reading experience even odder, as if somehow suspended outside time.

However, now I am curious to read No. 2 to see if there is any story to be found. It is in my mind that I read the whole trilogy, but I can't remember a thing.

[Trace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pure delight! I'm looking forward to the next one in this series.

[Nicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lark Rise does not have a plot. If that's what you care about most, it's not a good idea to try it, I don't think -- and I hear it's nothing like the tv series, Lark Rise to Candleford. It's somewhat lacking in terms of characters, too: mostly there are thumbnail sketches of characters.

The writing, however, is somehow absorbing enough -- at least to me -- that it's worth reading anyway. It's a very idealised view of quotidian village life in England during Queen Victoria's reign. Flora Thompson continually states that these people knew how to happy on very little, and details their simple pleasures and the pains of their poverty as if the latter allowed them to enjoy the former in some special way we can't touch now. It's quite a one-sided view, though since this is supposedly more or less autobiography, there's a truth in it too.

The whole book is basically nostalgia trip to an older, golden-seeming existence. I don't know why I enjoyed it so much, really, and I wondered if I would even make it through the whole book when I first realised what it was like. But there's really something sweet and enchanting about it.

[ValeReads Kyriosity · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having enjoyed the BBC series, I was expecting the same sort of thing here, but the book is not really a novel with a plot; it's sketches of country life from the author's childhood in the 1880s. I tagged it both as fiction and as biography/memoir. I started it while crocheting on vacation, but as I really needed something with story grip to keep me going on that task, I abandoned it. But I didn't hate it outright, so I picked it up and finished it later. And while I found it pretty dull going in general, it was anthropologically interesting, and it spiked my emotions at two points. First, the description of the clergy made me angry. The Church of England's grandest tradition appears to be the propagation of false shepherds. Second, the very last line moved me to tears. I shan't repeat it here for the sake of avoiding spoilage.

Karen Cass gave her usual apt performance as narrator.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to rate as it's almost a text book of late Victorian life in rural England. Great descriptions of a life that our ancestors lived and only a few generations ago tinged with sadness about how many perished in the futility of the first world war.

[Lydia Therese · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lark Rise reminded me of Little House in the Big Woods in a lot of ways. It didn't have a solid plot, but instead followed the many different people that made up Lark Rise, a little country hamlet, in 1890's England. The story is semi-autobiographical and recounts how people made a living and what they did to entertain themselves. It is filled with small, simple joys that have been lost today -- and even in the 1930s, when this book was published -- and a whole cast of characters who are doing their best to make ends meet as poor country farmers.

I enjoyed reading the accounts of a time long gone by, but the book did lack any sort of a plot, which made it difficult to get through at times. Most of the tales were amusing and entertaining nonetheless. (A warning, there is a part of the story where the children dress up in blackface for entertainment. That was a part where I cringed. It was, unfortunately, something people did for fun back then. Even the Little House books have it.) It was fascinating to read about life in England before the turn of the century by a person who was actually there. I will definitely be continuing on with the trilogy!

3/5 stars.

[Stephanie]

This book was wonderful and so completely different from the TV show. Flora Thompson's semi-autobiographical novel is a classic, full of rich prose and vivid imagery. I loved the look at times past and how times changing affected the village of Lark Rise and their customs. This book had such a nostalgic feel and had me wondering down memory lane of my own childhood and the wonder of youth. Flora Thompson included so many historical details of Lark Rise, including housing, clothes, holiday celebrations, childbirth, and social mores. Despite being detailed, the plot is very endearing and charming and urges the reader to continue reading. While this doesn't have an overarching plot, it is a very compelling, cozy read and one that I highly recommend!

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent history/memoir. Don’t read it expecting a plot, but rather descriptions of “how things were” interspersed with little tales, character sketches, and setting descriptions. Thompson is a good writer and it isn’t repetitive like other similar books I’ve read lately.

[Carrie Brownell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this, but I didn't 100% love it. It reminded me a lot of Mitford, what with its slow and steady pacing. Set in Oxfordshire it's a delightful look at English society at the turn of the century. I'm told that books 2 and 3 are even better so I'm looking forward to reading on before watching the television production.

[Tatyana Naumova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Невероятно, но факт: тут вообще нет сюжета! Никакого! Просто жизнеописание деревеньки)

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first book in a series of three, that the television show "Lark Rise to Candleford" is based on. If you are a fan of the television show, you should know that this book reads more like a documentary than a story, and that the television version has much more character development than the book does. And this first book in the series only covers Laura's childhood.

Although it reads somewhat like a documentary the writing is beautiful, sometimes lyrical, and gives a fascinating view of life in a farming hamlet of 1880s England. During the 1880s, change was stirring, and it ended up being the last decade where this way of life existed. The Queen's Jubilee in 1887, celebrating her 50 year reign, marked a turning point after which things were never quite the same in hamlet life. It was becoming more and more difficult to exist as a farm laborer, farming a rich landlord's land, and mechanization was beginning and becoming more prevalent.

A beautiful read, similar to the "Little House on The Prairie" series, but with less focus on characters and stories, and more focus on how life was lived. Flora Thompson is telling the story of her childhood, just as Laura Ingalls Wilder told hers in the "Little House" series. And both stories were published at similar times and took place at almost the same time - this one in England, and "Little House" in America.

[Etta Mcquade · Rating 4 out of 5]

This, the first of the trilogy by Flora Thompson, published in 1939,is the account of life in rural Oxfordshire in the last decades of the 19th century, just as times begin to change. Laura, who is really the young Flora, is both participant and observer in the story as she describes the goings-on in the village and closely surrounding areas. Nothing exciting happens, but yet I was caught up in her descriptions and sly humor and yearned to be there, until Laura describes the proverty. ("Lark Rise to Candleford" is currently being shown on PBS.)

[Maya · Rating 5 out of 5]

A plotless and, in a way, character-less description of rural life in the 1880s that somehow is one of the best things I have ever read

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let me say from the outset that Lark Rise is a wonderful book. Many of you will have heard of Lark Rise to Candleford but you may not know (as I didn’t) that the latter is a compilation of author Flora Thompson’s three books: Lark Rise, Over to Candleford and Candleford Green. In fact I bought both because I thought the latter was a sequel. I don’t regret this, however, because the two volumes I bought, both published by the Folio Society, are very different in format. Lark Rise contains a good number of photographs featuring not only Flora and her family but village life from fin de siècle north Oxfordshire in general. Lark Rise to Candleford in contrast, has drawn illustrations. These are very good, but to have both drawings and photos is even better.

Flora Jane Timms was born in Juniper Hill, Oxfordshire (often shortened to Oxon in the UK) in 1876. The place of her birth was a small hamlet rather than a village – it had houses and an inn but not much else – the residents had to go to the nearest village for church, school and post office.

Flora was different from the majority of her fellows: she loved books and poetry, and was somewhat quiet and not ‘in’ with the other children. This meant she was not as involved in some of the life going on around her but she was watching and listening, and remembered everything.

She read a lot and always wanted to write, and in her later life she wrote an article about her childhood which was published in The Lady magazine in 1937. It was so good she was asked to submit more articles, and later the publisher suggested she send them to Oxford University Press to be made into a book – and Lark Rise was born. It was very well received so she wrote the two further memoirs, though names were changed, presumably for legal reasons. She was by now an elderly lady in poor health, and passed away in 1947. Luckily, we can enjoy her reminiscences in perpetuity; like many people, I always regret not quizzing my grandparents more about their lives because I am sure many people living ordinary lives do, in fact, have terrific stories to tell, and these are so often lost to the world, sadly. What it is to be too busy to talk!

In this book, Flora treats us to a complete history of Juniper Hill (called Lark Rise in the book) in the 1880s: the adults, the work they did, their habits, their prejudices, their clothes, their skills and their way of living; the children, their games and songs, the school and church they attended, and the fashions of the time. Mostly agricultural workers, most were very poor and lived a hand-to-mouth existence – but were generally happy. Flora seems to have had a very modern eye because she makes several comments comparing that time with ‘these days’ that were made in the late 1930s and early ‘40s that do not sound out of place now.

At that time and place life was changing rapidly. Machines were beginning to do the work of men, the government introduced compulsory schooling (thank goodness), social mores and views were changing and the ancient pastoral life was giving way to modernity, albeit slowly.

I found this book not only a joy to read but an eye-opener into late Victorian life. It puts other histories or novels you may have read (Hardy, Trollope, Dickens) into perspective and brings a sense of how ordinary country folk really lived their lives, in a way that feels real and authentic rather than just reading about ‘history’. I loved it and will read it again.

As I said earlier in this review, this Folio Society edition contains a good number of contemporary photographs, and these add a lot to the overall impact of the book. Highly recommended.

[Carly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm cheating slightly by marking the first book as finished when there are technically two sequels in the same edition I was reading, but they are counted as a trilogy, so that's my excuse. As lovely and nostalgic as the book was, I don't have the patience to read another few hundred pages. I don't want to rush through them. This book was a beautiful study of a time period and setting I've always been fascinated by- it's actually not a million miles from where I grew up, the area where generations of my family worked as agricultural labourers and probably led very similar lives to the ones chronicled in this book.
It makes me long for a lost world that I never knew. The book was a bit sentimental, but aren't we all sentimental about our childhoods? It's the best thing I've read that is set in this era. I think the history of people who grew up like Flora is immeasurably important and shouldn't be overlooked. Forget the politics and kings and queens of England: this is our story.

[Ilya Solovyev · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting source of knowledge about rural life in 1880's England. The book is semi autobiographical which makes it partly fiction and partly documentary. I enjoyed that the main character of the book is at the same time the child (with her sometimes "childish" attitude, thoughts and language) and the adult narrator (the same girl but after about 40 years) with her life experience and much more knowledge about the girl (herself). There are many amusing moments and details, although the life depicted is not always very easy and happy, the people are mostly cheerful and sympathetic.
Absolutely great descriptions of nature, plants, birds.
By the way, the BBC series has absolutely nothing to do with the book (except the title). The book is a very well written combination of a diary, memoir, historical novel and witty fiction, while the BBC show looks like a typical TV soap opera with cheap humour and flat characters. Don't bother to watch it if you liked the book.

[Margaret Roberts · Rating 3 out of 5]

A retelling of a humble life in England in the 1880's, flora shares memories of village life through her character, Laura. More information than story-telling, Thompson shares about memorable characters, festivals, traditions and regular everyday living. Its funny to think that at the time this was written after WW1 this way of living was considered' old-fashioned and nearly forgotten!