South Riding

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I lean against that gate in the ivied wall under the ash tree, and hear the clump of farm horse hoofs coming from the drinking pond, and see the sunset beyond the horse pasture and the sixty-acre stretch that lies, dark plough-land, up to the flaming sky.” Winifred Holtby, 1934 I just finished Thrush Green, which is similar only in that it is about a country town in England. Here, there is heartache and the sordid doings of real people; whereas, Thrush Green is almost a fantasy. The worst people in Thrush Green are a cranky old woman and a petty thief. Here we find an alderman twisted by sexual abuse as a child, mothers who overburdened with children and work, die before their time and every sort of misery that can be imagined.

South Riding (2011 TV series) - Wikipedia South Riding (2011 TV series) - Wikipedia

Although a maid is described as being trilingual - speaking BBC English to her employer, cinema American with her friends and dialect to the milkman. The language of the novel is almost entirely standard British English. I didn't read about Winnifred Holtby ever visiting America, but what I was watching reminded a whole lot of Chicago rather than Yorkshire.a b Williams, Shirley (19 February 2011). "The tragic story of 'South Riding' ". The Independent. London . Retrieved 20 January 2017.

South Riding (Virago Modern Classics): Holtby, Winifred South Riding (Virago Modern Classics): Holtby, Winifred

First published in 1936 this is a marvelously femenist novel. Set in the fictional South Riding, with much of the story concerning local poitics, and the different characters and factions associated with the county council, alongside other local people. There is a large cast of characters, at the centre of which is Robert Carne, landowner and councillor, Sarah Burton, a new headmistress for the high school, and Mrs Beddows 72 Alderman, and great friend of Carne. Mrs Beddows - a truly marvelous character - seems to be a portrait - at least in part of Winifred Holtby's mother, herself a local councillor who became (like Mrs Beddows) the first woman Alderman.A wide range of characters means a wide range of relationships, and here too Winifred Holtby excels. Whether two people are cooperating or at loggerheads they always act in a way that is so appropriate and well described that I experienced everything along with them. Tom and Lily’s relationship broke my heart time and time again, and they are relatively minor characters (if there can be said to be such a thing in this novel). Not only does she write scenes tightly focused on one individual or group, she also writes the best, most effective crowd scenes I’ve ever read. The outside performance put on by Madam Hubbard’s girls, at which cast and audience alike spend more time focusing on their own individual thoughts and agendas than the show, is an absolute masterpiece. Her writing reveals a wealth of life experience put to very good use. This book is set in the early 1930s in the fictional South Riding of Yorkshire. It’s an ensemble piece, structured around the activities of local government and the ways they intersect with the characters’ lives. Most versions of the cover feature Sarah Burton, the fiery, progressive new headmistress at the local girls’ school, and she’s one of the most important characters, but there are others: the elderly alderwoman, Mrs. Beddows; the gentleman farmer, Robert Carne, and his troubled daughter, Midge; the bright but impoverished teenager, Lydia Holly; the hedonistic but devout preacher, Councillor Huggins. South Riding follows these characters (and more*--it’s a story about an entire community) over two years, with chapters alternating among various characters. The two moved to London and shared a house on Doughty Streetin Bloomsbury, now marked with a Blue Plaque. Vera Brittain & Winifred Holtby Blue Plaque, courtesy Wikimedia Commons In 2018, we commissioned the York Archaeological Trust to carry out ‘Food for Thought’, a project exploring the history and archaeological landscape of the Yorkshire Wolds. Find out more in our Research Magazine. This was a book of meta-fiction. Her mother wouldn’t read the book and tried to stop its publication.

South Riding (1938) - IMDb South Riding (1938) - IMDb

Sarah Waters, a well-respected UK author, who said, ‘I can’t say enough good things about this book.’ The Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize". The Royal Society of Literature. Archived from the original on 14 June 2011 . Retrieved 10 August 2010. Episode 1, Winifred Holtby - South Riding Omnibus - BBC Radio 4 Extra". BBC . Retrieved 23 September 2017. Adams, Pauline (1996). Somerville for Women: An Oxford College, 1879-1993. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199201822. At first there are inevitable comparisons to be made with Jane Eyre, but this would be too easy for Holtby, and she steers things towards a different place, one altogether more poignant and stubbornly grounded in the real. Though her prose is pedestrian in places, there is a bleak, brave quality to her writing, and certain passages are desperately wrenching.At Oxford, Holtby met Vera Brittain, and it is through this friendship that she is probably best known. She worked in a nursing home with wounded soldiers returning from the front, before joining the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, with a post as a forewoman at a hostel on the frontline, near Abbeville, France. In her story of the imaginary 'South Riding' of Yorkshire, she strove to preserve for us a part of the changing England that is typical of the whole. These letters between Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby cover 15 years of a remarkable friendship that began at Somerville College, Oxford in 1919 and ended only with Holtby’s premature death from kidney failure in 1935.

South Riding: An English Landscape (Virago Modern Classics)

Set in a fictional district of Yorkshire in the early 1930s, South Riding is an epic, life-affirming novel which explores issues of poverty, social mobility and the value of education. On one level, it is an ensemble piece structured around the workings of local government, their impact on the district of South Riding and the people who live there. It is also a feminist book, one concerned with the destinies of women from different points along the social spectrum, both young and old. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I loved this thoroughly absorbing novel, a definite five-star read for me.

Subsequent works were set in the suburbs of Hull and the Yorkshire Dales, and her semi-autobiographical novel The Crowded Street would bring to life her childhood in the Wolds and school days in Scarborough. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, eds Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (London: Batsford, 1990), p. 535.