Flora Jane Thompson (née Timms; 5 December 1876 – 21 May 1947) was an English novelist and poet best known for her semi-autobiographical trilogy about the English countryside, Lark Rise to Candleford. Early life and family Thompson was born Flora Jane Timms in Juniper Hill in northeast Oxfordshire, the eldest child of Albert and Emma Timms, a stonemason and nursemaid respectively. Albert and Emma had twelve children, but only six survived childhood. One of her younger sisters was Betty Timms, best known for her children's book The Little Grey Men of the Moor. The young Flora's early education was at the parish school in the village of Cottisford where she was described as 'altogether her father's child'. In 1891, at the age of 14, Flora moved to take up a position as counter clerk at the post office in Fringford, a village about northeast of Bicester, under the tutelage of the postmistress, Mrs Kezia Whitton. She later served at various other post offices, including offices at Grayshott, Yateley, and Winton in Bournemouth. In 1903 she married John William Thompson, a post office clerk and telegraphist from the Isle of Wight, at Twickenham Parish Church, after which they moved to Bournemouth where they had a daughter, Winifred Grace (1903), and a son, Henry Basil (1909). In 1916 they moved to Liphook where their second son Peter Redmond was born (1918). Thompson's favourite brother, Edwin, was killed near Ypres in 1916. Literary output A self-taught and a largely self-educated writer, Thompson was thinking, as early as 1922, about writing of her childhood. In 1911 she had won an essay competition in The Ladies Companion for a 300-word essay about Jane Austen. Her younger sister, Ethel Elizabeth 'Betty' Timms shared her love of writing, and Betty's success with a children's book, 'The Little Grey Men of the Moor', published in 1926, encouraged Flora to write her books. She later wrote extensively, publishing short stories and magazine and newspaper articles. She was also a keen self-taught naturalist; many of her nature articles were anthologised in 1986. In 1938 Thompson sent some essays on her country childhood to Oxford University Press. They were accepted and published in three separate volumes, Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), and Candleford Green (1943). In 1945 the books were republished as a trilogy under the title Lark Rise to Candleford. The trilogy is a lightly disguised story of