South Riding

I bought this as an 80th birthday present for my Yorkshire mother. She is thoroughly enjoying it, saying that it is so true to how life was lived before the Welfare State. Winifred Holtby - whose own story was told in Vera Brittain's Testament of Friendship - cleverly used the framework of council meetings and concerns to show just how such decisions touched the lives of ordinary men and women in the 1930s. Definitely worth a read, if only make you thankful you live in more enlightened and socially protected times.

South Riding is a massive novel (564 pages)--but a quick read. It deals with a huge cast of characters. Sarah Burton is technically the main one; but the tapestry is enormous, and Holtby has such a sure touch for characterization that she breathes life into even the minor figures. In breadth of scope and generosity of heart and mind, Winifred Holtby reminds me of George Eliot. She seldom judges, though she obviously has her preferences and dislikes. She sees the interrelationships of all classes and all actions. But Holtby is a better stylist than Eliot. She is both clear and poetic, both brief and profound. Her apprenticeship as a journalist served her well. She gets right to the heart of feelings and facts, yet they shimmer with life and richness. She is particularly good on the imponderables--why a sensible and self-confident progressive like Sarah Burton should fall so incongruously in love with a feudal troglodyte like Robert Carne; why Carne should sacrifice everything for his neurotic-and-psychotic wife Muriel. She is also good on depicting the sweep of history. Though her characters are real people, they are also emblematic of historical trends: the long slow death of the landed aristocracy, the encroachment of urbanization and industrialization, the flattening of tragedy and democratization of hope. A wonderful book

Winifred Holtby's last and perhaps greatest work was published after her death at the age of 37. This novel is a tribute to the land and to the people of East Yorkshire, Holtby's native place.(There is no South Riding in Yorkshire) This is her version of Middlemarch 1935 and it is a masterpiece. South Riding is a novel of Yorkshire between the wars when the social fabric of the society was changing ; the landed gentry were becoming vanishing breed and their lifestyle, like their stately homes, became too extravagent to maintain. It is a novel of social change, Sarah Burton returns to the Riding,no longer the blacksmith's daughter but as an educated woman. She comes home with a Masters (rare in that day),traveled (she has taught in South Africa,)to take over the local girls school. Ms. Burton's goal is to prepare the girls, whatever their social and economic status for their place in a changing civilization. They will become professional women, not soley identified as wives or spinsters but individuals in their own right, their talents developed by their education will be put to use for the communal good. She and the local Squire Robert Carne, who is also on the school board, agree on nothing and her fight for progressive education clashes with his notion of women and their dependence and gentility. Yet, there is an attraction between these antagonists and a respect that transcends their disagreements. There is also a night in a hotel but ... One other major character Mrs. Beddows, the local councilwoman, was based on Holtby's mother who was the first alderwoman elected in Yorkshire, thru her eyes we are made aware of Holtby's belief that when local government puts the needs of their citizens before personal gain, the community benefits and contributes more effectively to the inner workings of a national or global society. Mrs. Holtby was scandalized by South Riding and tried to have it suppressed, fortunately she was not her daughter's literary executrix and to her dismay it was published. The political content was so accurate that Mrs. Holtby resigned. South Riding is a book that acknowledges the cycle of birth and death. There are several deaths in the novel,Holtby virtually willed herself to live long enough to finish her work. Death does not triumph,Holtby's hopes for the new generation foresaw a continuation of love for the land and the community and an elegic respect for the vanished landscape. Through Sarah Burton's eyes, Holtby shares, with the reader, a vision when South Riding would embrace the ideas and progress of the 20th Century and welcome equally the talents of all the Riding's inhabitants.

Winifred Holtby, who died at a tragically young age, came from a generation scarred by the First World War, and determined to build a better future.It is not difficult to see the author represented in the main character, Sarah Burton, an idealistic, headstrong young woman who comes to a small Yorkshire coastal town in the Thirties to take up a post as headmistress in the local girls school. The book deals enthrallingly and movingly with Sarah, her love for the doomed landowner Robert Carne, and the people she encounters along the way.South Riding is a dearly-loved book, full of passion and poetry and humour. It deserves to be much better known than it is. The book was the last and greatest work of its young author and I recommend you read it.