Lark Rise to Candleford is one of the defining accounts of nineteenth-century rural England, yet little is known of the writer behind it. Richard Mabey’s moving biography reveals a woman who commemorated village life but also longed to escape it, telling a story of myth-making, transformation and the struggle for creative expression.

While the Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy, Flora Thompson’s much-loved portrait of life in the English countryside, has inspired a hit television series, relatively little is known about the author herself. In this highly original book, bestselling biographer and nature writer Richard Mabey sympathetically retraces her life and her transformation from a post-office clerk who left school at fourteen to a sophisticated professional writer. Revealing how a formidable imagination can arise from the humblest of beginnings, Dreams of the Good Life paints a poignant, unforgettable portrait of a working-class woman writer’s struggle for creative expression.