"Flora Thompson, who in the guise of Laura, the stonemason's daughter, has given us in Lark Rise to Candleford (first published in 1945) a truly remarkable evocation of Oxfordshire village and small-town life at the turn of the nineteenth century; probing profoundly into mentalités before that concept had even been invented, and depicting unforgettably how an organic society, with its special customs and ways of expression, yielded to the new economic and cultural forces of modernity. If the definition of greatness on the part of historians includes durability, then Flora Thompson, more widely read now than ever before, certainly qualifies, along with seemingly more exalted figures in the pantheon."