the author's own youth, describing life in a hamlet, a village, and a country town in the 1880s. Two of Thompson's later lesser-known works were published posthumously: Heatherley, recounting her time in the post office at Grayshott at the turn of the 20th century when several of her lifelong interests took shape, the longing for education and culture and the desire to become a writer; and her last book Still Glides the Stream. Critical reception H. J. Massingham said of Thompson in 1944, "...she possesses the attributes both of sympathetic presentation and literary power to such a degree that her claims can hardly be questioned". Thompson's essays have been said to reveal an impressive knowledge of English literature and a gift for writing intelligent but accessible prose for a general audience. She approached novel writing as an artistic process and her descriptions of nature are notably poetic. Thompson's biographer, Gillian Lindsay, says, "...this girl whose elementary education was not enough to allow her to take a Civil Service examination, had written a classic book, a piece of enduring literature," while Shuckburgh considers that it was her 'passion and control' that made Thompson such a good writer. Her entry in the ODNB says of the trilogy that "Few works better or more elegantly capture the decay of Victorian agrarian England". Thompson's trilogy has been widely used as a primary source for the social history of the period, although some historians have expressed reservations as to its validity for that purpose. Death The death of Thompson's younger son during the Second World War affected her deeply and overshadowed her final years. She died in 1947 of a heart attack in Brixham, and is buried at Longcross Cemetery, Dartmouth, Devon. Bibliography Verse Bog Myrtle and Peat (1921) Novels Lark Rise (1939) Over to Candleford (1941) Candleford Green (1943) Lark Rise to Candleford (1945, the above three novels published as a trilogy) Still Glides the Stream (1948, published posthumously) Heatherley (1944, published posthumously first in A Country Calendar 1979 along with some Peverel Papers and some poems; then as single volume in 1998) Gates of Eden (serialised in The Peverel Monthly edited by Thompson in the late 1920s but never published as a separate volume) Dashpers (unfinished, unpublished novel) Nature articles The Peverel Papers (Abridged version published 1986; Complete version published 2008) References Sources External links Flora Thompson website Friends of Flora Thompson Bog