In a fitted box. Cream cloth with village image binding with gilt title on the spine.

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• Folio First Edition

Semi-autobiographical novel about the countryside of north-east Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, England, at the end of the 19th century. The story relates to the community in the the hamlet of Juniper Hill. First novel in the Lark Rise To Candleford Trilogy.

Flora Jane Thompson (née Timms; 5 December 1876 – 21 May 1947) was an English novelist and poet best known for her semi-autobiographical trilogy about the English countryside, Lark Rise to Candleford.

Thompson was born Flora Jane Timms in Juniper Hill in northeast Oxfordshire, the eldest child of Albert and Emma Timms, a stonemason and nursemaid respectively. Albert and Emma had twelve children, but only six survived childhood. One of her younger sisters was Betty Timms, best known for her children’s book The Little Grey Men of the Moor. The young Flora’s early education was at the parish school in the village of Cottisford where she was described as ‘altogether her father’s child’.

In 1891, at the age of 14, Flora moved to take up a position as counter clerk at the post office in Fringford, a village about 4 miles (6.4 km) northeast of Bicester, under the tutelage of the postmistress, Mrs Kezia Whitton. She later served at various other post offices, including offices at Grayshott, Yateley, and Winton in Bournemouth.

In 1903 she married John William Thompson, a post office clerk and telegraphist from the Isle of Wight, at Twickenham Parish Church, after which they moved to Bournemouth where they had a daughter, Winifred Grace (1903), and a son, Henry Basil (1909). In 1916 they moved to Liphook where their second son Peter Redmond was born (1918). Thompson’s favourite brother, Edwin, was killed near Ypres in 1916.