{"product_id":"illustrated-lark-rise-to-candleford-the-9781851709946","title":"'ILLUSTRATED LARK RISE TO CANDLEFORD  THE'","description":"\u003cp\u003eFlora Thompsons trilogy Lark Rise to Candleford is one of the best-loved of all books about the English countryside. It was published forty years ago  and the past it describes is now a century away. Yet it remains perhaps the most vivid  detailed and immediate portrait of country life ever written. Flora Thompson herself was a cottage child  born in 1878 and brought up in poverty in the tiny Oxfordshire hamlet of Juniper. (Juniper is renamed Lark Rise in the book  and Flora calls herself Laura.) From the age of five to when she left school at twelve  she and her brothers and sisters walked each day the three miles to Cottisford (Fordlow)  where her teacher Miss Holmes used to say  Oh  Laura! What a dunce you are! But Miss Holmes was wrong  for Flora possessed the literary gifts  the eye and memory for everyday detail and the intimacies of experience  which would one day combine to produce this gentle masterpiece. In the 1880s the countryside was on the brink of unalterable change  and the march of progress would soon wipe away the unique idiosyncrasies of a centuries-old way of life. But Flora Thompson was born in time to capture it before it vanished for ever  with her unforgettable gallery of characters - Old Sally  Miss Lane the postmistress  Sir Timothy  Miss Macey and the rest - and her unsentimental but deeply affectionate account of the humble details of the life she knew.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44897744912437,"sku":"ByrdShop_1851709940","price":278.79,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9781851709946.jpg?v=1784695213","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/illustrated-lark-rise-to-candleford-the-9781851709946","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}