Flora Thompson: Beyond Candleford: Two Plays: Flora’s Heatherley & Flora’s Peverel

These two plays, written by a local historian, tell the story of the Lark Rise to Candleford author in the days before she became famous. In Flora’s Heatherley we see her in Grayshott (her Heatherley) at the age of 21 taking the position of sub-postoffice assistant, and staying for two and a half years. She arrived as a young, gauche, country girl, and passed from foolish youth to wicked adolescence in the village. She drew disapproval by associating with ‘strange’ men, and walking for miles alone on the surrounding heaths, and felt more at home having tea with a retired ‘big-game’ hunter, or learning about local wildlife from a cowman on the common, than walking decorously up and down the village street with the other village girls. The theme of this play is essentially about the conventions of the period, particularly with respect to courtship and marriage, and Flora’s difficulty in conforming to them. In Flora’s Peverel we see her as a married lady with a husband and children of her own, hoping, against the odds, to win the fight to write. The Thompsons stayed in Liphook (her Peverel) for twelve years, during which time their third child was born and Flora started to write more seriously than she had before. As a wife and mother she is still battling against the conventions of the day, and her husband’s implied criticism of her aspirations to be regarded as an author.