John Yorke continues his exploration of Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson’s much-loved account of rural life.

Lark Rise to Candleford is one of our best loved evocations of rural England, but it is also an evocation of rural poverty, and of the emerging opportunities for young women as a new century dawned.

It tells the story of a girl growing up in a poor rural hamlet in rural Oxfordshire in the 1880s. Eventually she moves to the village of Candleford Green to begin her adult life working in a post office, and her story frames the larger one of Britain at the end of the 19th century, facing seismic social change.

In this second episode, John explores how the journey made by the central character in the book, Laura Timmins, reflects Flora Thompson’s own journey from a country childhood to the world of work and wider society. He wants to know how Lark Rise to Candleford echoes the rapid social changes taking place at the end of the 19th century, specifically the growth of towns and the opportunities they offered for new forms of employment and leisure. Flora Thompson’s book is unusual because it gives a female perspective to life at the turn of the 20th century; John is keen to find out how poor women’s horizons broadened as they started to glimpse the possibility of lives beyond marriage, motherhood or a job in domestic service.

John Yorke has worked in television and radio for thirty years, and he shares his experience with Radio 4 listeners as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatized on BBC Radio 4. From EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless, he has been obsessed with telling big popular stories. He has spent years analysing not just how stories work but why they resonate with audiences around the globe and has brought together his experience in his bestselling book Into the Woods. As former Head of Channel Four Drama, Controller of BBC Drama Production and MD of Company Pictures, John has tested his theories during an extensive production career working on some of the world’s most lucrative, widely viewed and critically acclaimed TV drama. As founder of the hugely successful BBC Writers Academy John has trained a generation of screenwriters - his students have had 17 green-lights in the last two years alone.

Credits: Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson, Oxford University Press, 1945

Produced by Jane Greenwood

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4