South Riding

Product Information

South Riding shows, in panorama and also in cross-section, a comprehensive view of society in Southeast Yorkshire, and among the hundred-and-sixty-nine characters are to be found a kitten, Kate Theresa, who plays a small part in the story, and a horse, Black Hussar, who plays a large one. I had read reviews where it seems that great liberties had been taken with the plot, I didn't see it myself.

This book is infatuated with the romance of the Lord of the Manor - but at the same time it is trying to reconcile that particular fantasy with very worthy ideals like feminism, quality education for women, alleviation of poverty, trying to provide proper health care and housing for very vulnerable people and hoping there won’t be another war. Completed just before she died, it shows Winifred Holtby at the full height of her remarkable powers and brings home even more forcibly how great a loss current literature has suffered'.

This being the 20th century, his wife isn't hidden in the attic but in a sanatorium (which puts a further financial strain on Carne's purse but my sympathies re: this vanished when the novel told me he was just too proud to let his wife's father pay for it) and the fact he's married isn't a secret, either. I could not finish The Librarian and most of our book club thought it was poor despite many good reviews on line. Much as I admire Winifred Holtby for her courageous feminism, peace activism and all the rest - this novel is such a mish mash - and it’s looong - it’s a modern (1930s) version of Jane Eyre complete with a taciturn, tragic but honourable version of Mr Rochester with a mad wife in an expensive care facility which is sending him bankrupt - a daughter who is somewhat hysterical and potentially ‘tainted’ so needs very careful handling - a spunky working class heroine who has managed to get an education and instead of being the governess, is the headmistress of the local girls high school, where the wobbly and unpopular young Rochester girl ends up being sent due to the family’s wealth having been eaten up by luxury sanatoriums. Winifred Holtby was a committed socialist and feminist who wrote the classic South Riding as a warm yet sharp social critique of the well-to-do farming community she was born into. Holtby had been Brittain's intimate friend since their days at Somerville College, Oxford, in the years immediately following the first world war.

Optimism and the will to optimism are different things, and Miss Holtby’s gallant effort to infer from her heroine’s change of heart a more hopeful future for society at large does not ring quite true as I have had the misfortune to read for a very long time. The dustwrapper is virtually complete, with just some very slight loss at the top and tail of the spine, just affecting the lettering.I must admit that Carne being played by David Morrissey helps somewhat to explain why both Sarah and Mrs. Holtby had tried to allay these fears in a "Prefatory Letter" to her mother in which she admitted that while Mrs Holtby's descriptions had first alerted her to the drama of English local government, her material for the novel had emanated from sources "unknown to you". The author had an unquenchable belief in and sympathy with human nature; the courage and vitality that enabled her to cover so triumphantly her gigantic canvas blow like a high wind through the story, ventilating its most infected crannies. The loss must have been heartbreaking for Vera Brittain, particularly in light what happened to her loved ones during the war.

The main protagonist of the novel is Sarah Burton, newly appointed headmistress of a girl’s school, moving back to the area of her birth; she is 40, single, a socialist and committed to the education of women. Her novel, set in provincial Yorkshire in the early 30s, is also in many ways the anti Brideshead Revisited or the anti Downton Abbey, if you like. Apparently, the floral tributes at Holtby's funeral were only rivalled by those at Ellen Terry's burial.Half a chapter of romance that made me well up with an undescribable churning in heart is a testament to Holtby's brilliance. But when it happens I am usually much more enchanted by the book than by the series, however well made they are.