Literary Output
Flora benefited from good access to books when the public library opened in Winton, in 1907. Not long after, in 1911, she won an essay competition in The Ladies Companion for a 300-word essay about Jane Austen. She later wrote extensively, publishing short stories and magazine and newspaper articles. She was a keen self-taught naturalist and many of her nature articles were anthologised in 1986.
Her most famous works are the Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy, which she sent as essays to Oxford University Press in 1938 and which were published soon after. She wrote a sequel Heatherley which was published posthumously. The books are a fictionalised, if autobiographical, social history of rural English life in the late 19th and early 20th century and are now considered minor classics.
Read more about this topic: Flora Thompson
Famous quotes containing the words literary and/or output:
“Dining-out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)