Heatherley: The Lost Sequel to "Lark Rise to Candleford" - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Flora Jane Thompson (1876-1947) is best known as the author of 'Lark Rise to Candleford'. Born in Oxfordshire, she moved to work in Hampshire in 1898 and remained in that county until 1928 when she and her family moved to Devon. It was here that she wrote her more famous works towards the end of her life.

Aus dem Klappentext

When the young Flora Thompson took up her duties at Grayshott post-office in 1898, she found to her amazement that her customers included Arthur Conan Doyle and George Bernard Shaw. The neighbouring settlement of Hindhead had attracted many eminent Victorians to take up residence, and the telegraph machine at Grayshott which Flora was employed to operate was their prime means of communication to the outside world.In 'Heatherley', she tells us that as a result of meeting these famous authors she 'destroyed her own scraps of writing, saying to herself as they smouldered to tinder that that was the end of a foolish idea.'Fortunately it did not stop her altogether, and from the perspective of some forty-five years after the events described, Flora Thompson remembers with her usual clarity back to a time when bicycles and Kodak cameras were just becoming popular, and she herself was guilty of crossing the strict conventions of propriety at the end of the nineteenth century.(Introduction by Anne Mallinson; Illustrations by Hester Whittle; Historical notes by John Owen Smith)

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One hot September afternoon near the end of the last century a girl of about twenty walked without knowing it over the border into Hampshire from one of its neighbouring counties. She was dressed in a brown woollen frock with a waist-length cape of the same material and a brown beaver hat decorated with two small ostrich tips, set upright in front, back to back, like a couple of notes of interrogation. This outfit, which would no doubt appear hideous to modern eyes, had given her great moral support on her train journey. The skirt, cut short just to escape contact with the ground and so needing no holding up except in wet weather, was, her dressmaker had assured her, the latest idea for country wear. The hat she had bought on her way through London that morning. It had cost nine and eleven-pence three farthings of the pound she had saved to meet her expenses until her first month's salary was due in her new post, but she did not regret the extravagance for it became her brown eyes and hair and would help her, she hoped, to make a good impression at her journey's end. "A good first impression is half the battle", she had been told as a child, and she had special reasons for wishing to make a good impression today, for she had lately been somewhat unsettled through taking short holiday-relief engagements at the post offices where she had worked and this new position, she hoped, would prove a permanency.

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Pale purple as the bloom on a ripe plum, veined with the gold of late flowering gorse, set with small slender birches just turning yellow, with red-berried rowans and thickets of bracken, the heath lay steeped in sunshine. The dusty white road by which she had come was deserted by all but herself, and the only sounds to be heard were the murmuring of bees in the heathbells and the low, plaintive cries of a flock of linnets as they flitted from bush to bush. From where she stood she could see, far away on the horizon, a long wavy line of dim blue hills which to her, used as she was to a land of flat fields, appeared to be mountains. The air, charged with the scent of heather and pine, had the sharp sweetness of wine and was strangely exhilarating to one accustomed from birth to the moist, heavy, pollen-laden air of the agricultural counties. She stood as long as she dared upon the edge of the heath, breathing long breaths and gazing upon the scene with the delight of a discoverer; then with a buoyant floating-upon-air feeling, passed on uphill towards the knot of red roofs which soon appeared among pine trees.