Flora Thompson (engl. Wikipedia, dte Wikipedia)
Ich kenne keinen Autor, der seine Figuren ebenso einfühlsam und gleichzeitig analytisch vorstellt. Außerdem ist es eine Schilderung einer Lebenswelt, die atmosphärisch dicht die jeweilige Situation vergegenwärtigt und gleichzeitig stets den Abstand zwischen der damaligen Welt und der der Erzählerin deutlich macht.
Margaret Lane (1979):
Like W.H. Hudson, whom she admired and whom in some ways she resembled, she was secretive about her own life because ist afforded little satisfaction. Like his, her essential experience was within.
She was, indeed, a down-to-earth country child, made strange only by the unaccountable poetic streak in her nature, which transmuted every commonplace experience into something precious.
Richard Mabey (2015):
"In Lark Rise, Flora was never attempting to write either a straight memoir or an objective social history, but something more nuanced, an imaginative reconstruction of what life felt like to a growing country child in those last years of the nineteenth century. And this frames the real story of Flora’s life as a fascinating paradox. Her fame comes from her commemoration of the virtues of traditional village life and people. Yet her own history consisted chiefly of an escape from this culture, and a hunger to become a different kind of person, a writer with her sights on the skies, not rutted in the agricultural vales."
"In a memoir entitled ‘A Country Child Taking Notes’, published in 1947, Flora recalls: ‘I never could remember in after-life when I began to write, but at seven years old I was penning letters in rhyme to Santa Claus, to be attached to my own and my brother’s Christmas stockings, and a little later, I was running a family magazine, which continued until my mother’s grocer changed the colour of his sugar wrapping-paper from greyish-white to a very dark blue, upon which no ink would show, and so caused me to experience my first paper shortage.’ "
"Flora was especially sensitive to smell. She recalls the aroma of Old Sally’s ‘kitchen-storeroom’ with the analytic discrimination of a wine-taster: ‘The apple crop was stored on racks suspended beneath the ceiling and bunches of herbs dangled below. In one corner stood the big brewing copper in which Sally still brewed with good malt and hops once a quarter. The scent of the last brewing hung over the place till the next and mingled with the apple and onion and dried thyme and sage smells, with a dash of soapsuds thrown in, to compound the aroma which remained in the children’s memories for life and caused a whiff of any two of the component parts in any part of the world to be recognized with an appreciative sniff and a mental ejaculation of “Old Sally’s!”.’ "
"When
she left school aged fourteen, Flora was probably no more moody than
any other teenager. But the obsession with reading and the
introspective fugues that she attributes to her young fictional self
begin to annoy her mother (somewhat
unfairly, since it had been Emma who had encouraged Flora’s taste
for stories in the first place). The time was approaching fast when
Laura would have to earn her own living and Emma worried what
possible future there could be for her impractical misfit of a
daughter. Perhaps a nursemaid was the only
answer. But there is a showdown one day when Laura is nursing the
Timmses’ latest baby, ‘with a book in her hand and,
absent-mindedly, put down the little hand which was trying to clutch
her long hair’. Her mother is furious. ‘Laura, I’m sorry to say
it, but I’m downright disappointed in you … I’ve been
watching you for the last ten minutes with that little innocent on
your lap and your head stuck in that nasty old book and not so much
as one look at his pretty ways. [...] You’ll
never make a nurse, sorry as I am to say so.’ So Emma abandons her
hope that Laura might join the annual diaspora of village girls in
the role of a nursemaid. Laura understandably worries that she is
lacking some essential womanly, sociable quality, that something is
amiss with her. ‘There was,’ Flora adds. ‘She was growing up,
and growing up, as she feared, into a world that had no use for her.
She carried this burden of care for months, not always conscious of
it; sometimes she would forget, and in the reaction become noisy and
boisterous; but it was always there, pressing down upon her, until
the neighbours noticed her melancholy expression and said: “That
child looks regular hag-rid”.’ Laura finds some consolation out
in the fields, and is briefly lifted by the energy of water and
tree-branch on a dull November day. But for Flora, a real solution, a
way out of the hamlet’s claustrophobia and into a world that did
have a use for her, wasn’t long in arriving.
[...]
In
the summer of 1891 (when Flora was fourteen and a half) she was
offered a job as a postal assistant in a large village nearby. The
invitation came from ‘an old girlhood’s friend of her mother’
Emma’s called Dorcas Lane, who ran the village Post Office,
adjacent to a blacksmith’s shop that Dorcas had inherited."
The urge to write is still smouldering somewhere inside her, though without any tangible outcomes. So is the urge to be fashionable, as if this might provide another way of expressing herself, as well as a more obvious key to social acceptability for someone who still remembered her childhood awkwardness. The two compulsions don’t sit easily together. They represent a duality that runs through Flora’s life, one half of her mind fixed dreamily on the future, the other trying to make the best of where she is, and the baggage of her origins; trying to relate to friends when intimacy was always a difficult thing for her. [...]
Flora gives Laura the benefit of her long reflection on how landscape shapes the spirit and the writer’s eye. ‘Her love of her own county was that of a child for its parent, a love which takes all for granted, instinctive rather than inspiring, but lifelong. Her love of the Heatherley countryside was of a different nature. It had come to her suddenly in that moment of revelation when, on the day of her arrival, she had unexpectedly come out on the heath and seen the heather in bloom. She had felt then a quick, conscious sense of being one with her surroundings.’ The sense of the homeland as emotional root was being subtly replaced by the idea of landscape as a lexicon of feeling. [...]
The urge to write is still smouldering somewhere inside her, though without any tangible outcomes. So is the urge to be fashionable, as if this might provide another way of expressing herself, as well as a more obvious key to social acceptability for someone who still remembered her childhood awkwardness. The two compulsions don’t sit easily together. They represent a duality that runs through Flora’s life, one half of her mind fixed dreamily on the future, the other trying to make the best of where she is, and the baggage of her origins; trying to relate to friends when intimacy was always a difficult thing for her. [...]
Flora gives Laura the benefit of her long reflection on how landscape shapes the spirit and the writer’s eye. ‘Her love of her own county was that of a child for its parent, a love which takes all for granted, instinctive rather than inspiring, but lifelong. Her love of the Heatherley countryside was of a different nature. It had come to her suddenly in that moment of revelation when, on the day of her arrival, she had unexpectedly come out on the heath and seen the heather in bloom. She had felt then a quick, conscious sense of being one with her surroundings.’ The sense of the homeland as emotional root was being subtly replaced by the idea of landscape as a lexicon of feeling. [...]
The poet in her watches blue butterflies dropping down and ‘threading themselves’ in silhouette on a grass stalk, ‘until they look like some new and strange flower’; and the naturalist wonders how the dust of their wings survives rainfall. Her writing is now becoming extravagantly discursive and she begins to look at everything – foxes, oak trees, shepherds, cakes in shops – with the same rapt fascination. Soon she can look at a swallow with an intensity that makes it seem quite new-minted. Its colour ‘was neither black nor blue, but an indescribably rich shade of violet, with underparts of a pearly pink, glowing to pale flame about the breast. [...] She empathizes with the brief life-experience of mayfly, seeming an ephemeral and meaningless waste to us, but from the insect’s perspective, a whole existence devoted to a ‘dance in the sun’. Flora isn’t just a distant watcher. She is standing up for her point of view too, at least in print. She rails against otter-hunting and the destruction of hedgerows. [...]
Flora was now absorbing more serious natural history through her reading, and the deepening understanding behind her observations begins to give them the kind of metaphorical power Gilbert White’s work often possesses. Sometimes, as he did, she pushes the analogies close to the edge of anthropomorphism, as in an account of the habits of black ants. ‘One very touching incident in ant-life takes place when the female, back from her marriage flight, prepares to make a home for the coming generation. The first thing she does is to nip off her own wings lest she should be tempted to disport herself in the sunshine, to the detriment of her maternal duties. There is something very human about this action, as many of my readers who are mothers will understand. I wondered no modern novelist has taken it for a text’ [...]
This is her fine reflection on mosses, from January 1927: ‘Long before the higher forms of vegetation could find foothold on the naked rock of the newly-cooled earth’s surface the mosses came and throve through countless generations, each small tuft drawing its sustenance from the air, attracting and holding together the dusty particles washed down by the rains, dying and leaving behind it the residue of its decay, until soil enough had collected for higher vegetable life to flourish in. Servi, or labourers, the great botanist Linnaeus called the mosses – a name of honour.’ It’s no surprise that memories of the hard-working community she had grown up with in Oxfordshire soon begin to be re-imagined in the Hampshire heathlands. In one of the final ‘Peverel Papers’, a character sketch of the Lark Rise ‘bee-wife’, Queenie Macey (see pp. 17–18), makes its first appearance.
This is her fine reflection on mosses, from January 1927: ‘Long before the higher forms of vegetation could find foothold on the naked rock of the newly-cooled earth’s surface the mosses came and throve through countless generations, each small tuft drawing its sustenance from the air, attracting and holding together the dusty particles washed down by the rains, dying and leaving behind it the residue of its decay, until soil enough had collected for higher vegetable life to flourish in. Servi, or labourers, the great botanist Linnaeus called the mosses – a name of honour.’ It’s no surprise that memories of the hard-working community she had grown up with in Oxfordshire soon begin to be re-imagined in the Hampshire heathlands. In one of the final ‘Peverel Papers’, a character sketch of the Lark Rise ‘bee-wife’, Queenie Macey (see pp. 17–18), makes its first appearance.
[...]
Flora continued to write ‘Peverel Papers’ for The Catholic Fireside and tutor her readers. But she wanted to do more for those who were hopeful of becoming writers themselves. So she brought the ‘Fireside Reading Circle’ to an end in 1925 and began planning her own postal writers’ group, to explore the educational potential of the business she had once worked in. She had become friendly with one of the regular contributors to the Circle’s competitions, the splendidly named Mildred Humble-Smith. Mildred (or Myldrede, as she called herself in print) had enjoyed the benefits of a formal higher education. [...] Together the two women launched ‘The Peverel Society’ in November 1925, with an advertisement in The Catholic Fireside. [...] For an annual subscription of 7s 6d, they could receive courses, written chiefly by Flora, on verse-writing, short stories, and literary techniques in general. They responded by submitting one piece of writing each month. The secretary (Humble-Smith) divided the entries into groups, based on the members’ individual needs, and made up a portfolio, which was circulated to all the members of the group, until all who wished to had read and commented on each entry. Flora made the final evaluation. [...] One development was the prophetically named ‘Chats Book’, which answered marketing queries and provided a site for discussion between members. But Flora was determined to keep the focus on literature, and if the Peverel Society could be portrayed as an early experiment in social networking, it was more obviously an outgrowth of the educationally and scientifically respectable ‘exchange’ societies which had begun to flourish in the Victorian era. [...] For Flora [...] the Peverel Society was one of the good things made possible by her one-time occupation and what she approvingly describes as ‘modern machinery’, and was an example of how her life, like her books, was an attempt to put a bridge between the best bits of tradition and innovation. [...]
She had one more moment of glory when Sir Humphrey Milford was interviewed in April 1946 for OUP’s house magazine, The Periodical, and was asked which he considered the two most important books the Press had brought out during his thirty-two years as university publisher. He chose Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History and Lark Rise to Candleford, and added that both dealt in ‘the history behind history’, and both had the rare ability to enlighten, entrance and excite at the same time.
[...]
When the combined edition was published in 1945, that year a perceptive review appeared in the New York Times by J. Donald Adams. He attempted to get to the marrow of the book, and explain its appeal. ‘What Miss Thompson has done is to set down an autobiographical record of English village and small town life … [...]
In 1978, when Britain was deep in the ‘Winter of Discontent’ and Margaret Thatcher just a year away from declaring there was no such thing as society, Keith Dewhurst created a dramatized version for the National Theatre. [...]
It is as if, for all its exact description of a way of life in a precise locality at a specific time, Lark Rise has floated free from its physical moorings and its mortal creator and been absorbed into the amorphous, comforting mythology of Old England. The title alone – the journey from dawn chorus to candlelit evening – seems to act like a mantra, setting off poignant daydreams even in those who know nothing of the story that follows. [...]
It is hard to read Lark Rise and not trust Flora Thompson
(Richard
Mabey: Dreams
of the Good Life: The Life
of Flora Thompson
and the Creation of Lark Rise to Candleford,
Penguin
Books 2015)
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