Introducing the latest addition to the Slightly Foxed Editions list, No. 58:
Flora Thompson
LARK RISE
Published 1 March
‘You are going to be loved by people you’ve never seen and never will see,’ a gypsy tells Laura, the central character in Flora Thompson’s lightly fictionalized memoir of her childhood in rural Oxfordshire during the last decades of the nineteenth century. It was a prediction that turned out to be true. Lark Rise – and its sequels Over to Candleford and Candleford Green – must be some of the best loved books ever written. They are unique both for the magical quality of the writing and for the background of their author. While most other countryside writers of the period were comfortably middle-class, this record of a vanishing world came from the daughter of a builder’s labourer.
Flora’s picture of life in Lark Rise is rich in practical detail, from the flowers in the cottage gardens and the clothes the villagers wore to the daily routines and entertainments of a society that rose and slept with the sun. It is a poetic picture too for it evokes a countryside before mechanization, where men ploughed the fields together, and where in late summer ‘the ripened cornfields rippled up to the doorsteps of the cottages, and the hamlet became an island in a sea of dark gold’.
Lark Rise is published on 1 March. Please do go ahead and place your order now, and we’ll post out copies as soon as they roll off the printing presses and arrive here in the office later this month. And if you’re on a repeat order to receive each limited-edition memoir each quarter, your usual hand-numbered copy will be dispatched on or around 24 February.
With best wishes, as ever, from the SF office staff
Jennie, Anna, Hattie, Jess & Iona