This is the story of the author of a classic of English literature, who is far less known than her great work, Lark Rise to Candleford, one of the defining accounts of life in the nineteenth-century countryside and the inspiration for a hit television series.

In this highly original book, bestselling biographer and nature writer Richard Mabey retraces Flora Thompson's life and her transformation from post-office clerk who left school at fourteen to a sophisticated professional writer. Mabey shows how her legacy emerged from a creative tension between two different dreams of the good life. Her book's appeal comes from her commemoration of the virtues of traditional village life at a moment of radical change. But her own story is about her escape from this culture, and a persistent hunger to become a different kind of person, a writer with her sights on the skies.

Mabey captivatingly interweaves Flora's semi-fictionalized stories with an account of her real life as she painstakingly taught herself to write: her absorption in the atmosphere of literary bohemia in Surrey; finding her true voice in the Hampshire hills, the charged landscape of her heroes, Gilbert White and Jane Austen; and the inspired creation of her leading character, Laura, a brilliantly crafted version of her childhood self. Mabey's empathy with the nuances of Thompson's narrative voice makes Dreams of the Good Life a poignant and unforgettable portrait of a working-class woman writer's struggle for creative expression.

• Juniper Hill: 'a gentle rise in the flat'
• Flora Timms: the awkward daughter
• The Post-Girl: Flora moves on
• The Hilltop Writers: a spell in rural Bohemia
• The Fin-de-Siècle girl
• Writing as a Cottage Industry
• The Journalist: forest fantasies
• The South Country: Flora and the sage of Selborne
• The Making of Laura
• Ballads and Bustles: Flora's folklore
• War Work: the launching of the trilogy
• Celebrating England
• Encores
  

Richard Mabey is the acclaimed author of some thirty books including Gilbert White, which won the Whitbread Biography Award in 1986, Flora Britannica (1995), winner of a National Book Award, and Nature Cure (2005), which was short-listed for three major literary awards: the Whitbread, Ondaatje, and J.R. Ackerley prizes. He writes for the Guardian, New Statesman and Granta, and contributes frequently to BBC radio. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.