Flora Jane Thompson (1876 - 1947) was an English novelist and poet famous for her semi-autobiographical trilogy about the English countryside, Lark Rise to Candleford. The stories relate to three communities: the hamlet of Juniper Hill ("Lark Rise"), where Flora grew up; Buckingham ("Candleford"), the nearest town, and the nearby village of Fringford ("Candleford Green"), where Flora got her first job in the Post Office. Because Thompson wrote her account some forty years after the events she describes she was able to identify the period as a pivotal point in rural history: the time when the quiet, close-knit and peaceful rural culture, governed by the seasons, began a transformation, through agricultural mechanisation, better communications and urban expansion, into the homogenised society of today.