Lark Rise to Candleford is one of the defining accounts of nineteenth-century rural England, yet little is known of the writer behind it. Richard Mabey's moving biography reveals a woman who commemorated village life but also longed to escape it, telling a story of myth-making, transformation and the struggle for creative expression.
Richard Mabey is the acclaimed author of some thirty books, including Gilbert White, which won the Whitbread Biography Award in 1986, Flora Britannica (1995), winner of a National Book Award, and Nature Cure (2005), which was short-listed for three major literary awards, the Whitbread, Ondaatje, and J.R. Ackerley prizes. He writes for the Guardian, New Statesman and Granta, and contributes frequently to BBC radio. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Terrific . . . what makes Mabey's appreciation of Lark Rise's
shape-shifting so compelling is that he never makes the mistake of
thinking that the original was summoned up by some act of the
collective unconscious. Instead, he reminds us of Thompson's
awkward and patient achievement, as the sole creator of a bona fide
work of art
*Guardian*
It seems unlikely we shall ever get closer to the woman who wrote
Lark Rise to Candleford
*Sunday Times*
Dreams Of The Good Life is a gem of a book, small, perfectly
formed, informative and, as his title suggests, dreamy
*Sunday Herald*
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