Lark Rise to Candleford
4/5
()
About this ebook
Flora Thompson
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.
Read more from Flora Thompson
Still Glides the Stream Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Lark Rise to Candleford
Related ebooks
Lark Rise to Candleford Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Lantern in Her Hand Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Elizabeth and Her German Garden Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cranford Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Cold Comfort Farm Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Diary of a Provincial Lady Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The blue castle Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Solitary Summer Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChronicles of Avonlea Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Castle Richmond Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Benefactress Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWives and Daughters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Far from the Madding Crowd Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVera Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rainbow Valley Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Custom of the Country Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Magic for Marigold Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5North and South Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mapp And Lucia (Complete Collection) (ShandonPress) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRilla of Ingleside Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cousin Phillis: A Romantic Classic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Aunt Branwell and the Brontë Legacy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUnder the Greenwood Tree Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bog-Myrtle and Peat: “The free, far-stretching moorland—That is the land for me!” Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Lark Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Enchanted April Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Freckles Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pat of Silver Bush Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Classics For You
The Master & Margarita Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wuthering Heights (with an Introduction by Mary Augusta Ward) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Women (Seasons Edition -- Winter) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fellowship Of The Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Learn French! Apprends l'Anglais! THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY: In French and English Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Jungle: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5East of Eden Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Animal Farm: A Fairy Story Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sense and Sensibility (Centaur Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Republic by Plato Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As I Lay Dying Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Things They Carried Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Count of Monte-Cristo English and French Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ulysses: With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Scarlet Letter Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tinkers: 10th Anniversary Edition Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Lark Rise to Candleford
33 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This beautifully written book powerfully evokes a time and a way of life that has passed but is still recent enough to seem familiar. Thompson evokes both the privations and the quiet satisfactions of English rural life. Different in style but similar in other ways is Ronald Blythe's Akenfield - he captures a later period closer to our own times but many of the scenes described by Thompson are echoed in his book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Classic account of life in earlier times. Well written, not dry or boring, it is the standard I use to measure all other historical memoirs.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lark 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. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I first thought this was a novel but after about a hundred pages of entertaining scene setting realised that is was vaguely autobiographical, and after another hundred pages of engaging description and nothing much happening realised that was all there was. A pleasant enough but idealised view of rural life in Oxfordshire ant the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. More than a bit saccharine and cloying. I agreed to read this for my book group and I am glad we only decided on the first book of the series as I had had enough after two hundred pages and found the last fifty a bit of a chore.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5These 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...
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Flora Thompson is best remembered for three (or four) memoirs she wrote, Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), Candleford Green (1943) and pothumously published Still glides the stream (1948. The first three volumes were also printed in one volume entitled Lark rise to Candleford.I thought this was a novel, but it turned out to be more like a work of social history of late-Victorian village life. Clearly, Flora Thompson doesn't have the skill of her contemporaries Thomas Hardy or Hugh Walpole. Lark Rise is well-written but rather boring.There isn't such an awful lot to write about village life, so at 247 pages the book seems a bit too long, with some information repeated. After about 150 pages it became a bit of a drag.