The Peverel Papers: A Year Book of the Countryside

Ebury Press. Very Good/Very Good. 1986. Hard Cover. 8vo 0712612963 Dust jacket complete except price clipped, some wear. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership marks. B&w illustrations, 224pp. clean and tight. Flora Thompson is famous for her unique masterpiece Lark Rise to Candleford, which describes Oxfordshire country life in the 188os when she was a child. It is not widely known, however, that for many years of her life she lived further south in Hampshire, and wrote some of her finest prose there. These writings took the form of monthly contributions to a magazine called the Catholic Fireside, now long defunct, and describe the natural history and rural life of the neighbourhood month by month throughout the year. Her very individual style of writing, her appealing and sensitive outlook on life, her accurate and detailed understanding of natural phenomena - all the qualities for which Lark Rise eventually made her famous - are present. What is now published here in hook form for the first time is undoubtedly an important literary discovery. For those who already know Flora Thompson's work it also has considerable biographical interest, for it reveals a number of new aspects of her life and personality which will be a revelation: the methods she used to overcome her insecurity as a writer, her literary models and ideals, and her dreams of a more leisured and creative life than that of wife to the postmaster of a small Hampshire town. Despite the sense of frustration and disappointment which she carried with her all her life, everything she wrote is imbued with robust common sense, wisdom and humour. The book is charmingly illustrated throughout with woodcuts and line illustrations by C. F. Tunnicliffe, mostly dating from the same period as the text. .