As Richard Mabey points out towards the end of his study of the making of Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson's rural classic is not only a periodic bestseller; it "rises like Excalibur" at times of national crisis. The National Theatre's adaptation, in which harvestmen scythed through the audience to the sound of the Albion Band, was staged during the winter of discontent; the illustrated Lark Rise, which sold a million copies, was published in 1983 when unemployment was at a record high; the BBC version began in 2008 as Britain plunged again into recession.
Yet both it and its creator remain somehow obscure, even mysterious. "The web of authorial legend and topographical curiosity that builds up around nationally popular texts simply hasn't gathered around Lark Rise," Mabey writes, mournfully. No coaches take tourists to Juniper Hill (aka Lark Rise) to gawp at Thompson's cottage and butter scones in her memory – and even if they did, such visitors would have little to ponder. Thompson herself is an almost invisible figure. Like the juniper bushes that once fringed her Oxfordshire hamlet - their leaves were used as an abortifacient – she has disappeared: no letters, no diaries, no juicy newspaper cuttings.
Dreams of the Good Life is Mabey's effort both to remedy this and to explain it. The latter he does extremely well, even if it's not much of a puzzle. Thompson's status as a "hedge-scribe" whose untutored words poured forth instinctively "like birdsong" might have been unwarranted – she grafted to become a writer – but it meant that she was easily ignored by the literary establishment. Thanks to Lark Rise's publisher, moreover, its genre often confounded the critics. Oxford University Press, which took receipt of the manuscript in 1938, didn't publish fiction, so the first volume and its two sequels were sold as autobiography, a decision that has had readers rushing to point out the differences between the page and reality ever since. Such confusion led, in turn, to accusations of untrustworthiness and sentimentality.
But filling the gaps is harder: so little information exists. Lucky, then, that Mabey has such sympathy for his subject, for it enables him to shed light even where facts are scant; he grasps instinctively Thompson's unrequited longings, a thwartedness that feeds into her work, for better or worse. I admired his approach to her writing, locating her work neatly in an England that had rediscovered the 18th-century naturalist Gilbert White, and was now exhibiting its collective rural longing in novels, art and politics. But thanks to this great tenderness, it was the more straight-forwardly biographical sections of his book I relished most.
Thompson was born in 1876, into a family that was different, and painfully so. While most of Juniper Hill's men were agricultural labourers, her father was a sculptor manqué who subscribed, like a character from Hardy, to a myth that suggested his forebears were high-born. Her mother had a love of music and storytelling that must sometimes have seemed frivolous in a place where people were often so hungry they would chew on raw turnips as they walked to the fields.
Thompson was bookish and bullied by other children, and Mabey believes it was this feeling of exclusion that turned her into the pseudo-anthropologist she became (Lark Rise is observant, but she never had a novelist's feeling for plot or character). But it was also the engine for the life she began to forge at 14, when she became a post-office clerk. By 1898 she was in charge of a sub post-office at Grayshott, Hampshire, a Bohemian place whose residents included Conan Doyle and Bernard Shaw – men on whom she loved to eavesdrop – and where she found friends who read Swinburne and a sequestered forest nook in which she could "steep herself" privately. Happiness lay in longs walks on the heathlands, and in the accommodation she rented for herself: a room of her own.
But in 1903 she married a fellow postal worker, John Thompson, and peace turned into something less than contentment. Looking for a means of expressing herself and earning extra money – she had to leave the post office once married – she entered an essay competition. This led to a relationship with the Ladies Companion, for whom she turned out short stories, their heroines every bit as frustrated as their creator, and to a nature column for the Catholic Fireside. Otter-hunting, kestrel-kills, the destruction of the hedgerows: she was now on her way.
In 1935, recalling that it was her sketches of "old country life" that had been most popular with readers of these pieces, she embarked on Lark Rise. It succeeded where her writing had previously failed thanks largely to the invention of her youthful avatar "Laura", an "interpreter who would translate Flora's memories into the vivid sensual language of her childhood". The book and its sequels were a critical and popular success; the war-weary reader (they were published in one volume in 1945) could retreat into them, safe in the knowledge that here was one community that would never go under. Their reception, however, changed Thompson's life barely at all. She died in 1947, having completed just one more (awful, unpublished) novel.
Mabey, our greatest nature writer, is predictably deft when it comes to Thompson's landscape and folklore, and his analysis of the imaginative achievement of Lark Rise is expert, even if his admiration does shade into reverence at times. But still, it has to be said that Dreams of the Good Life is rather a strange book. It comes with a strong whiff of fanaticism, so much effort having been devoted to cracking one relatively small nut, and there are moments when Mabey's Candlefordian pedantry impedes the flow of his narrative, blocking it up like a dam. It is as if he feels he must justify his interest in Thompson to the reader (and, perhaps, his publisher). This is a pity. Simple enthusiasm would, I think, have been more than enough to see him through; a shorter, less fervent book would have been just as singular, and every bit as illuminating.
