South Riding

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This is an epic portrait of the fictional Yorkshire county of South Riding in the 1930s. It describes the events following the hiring of a new headmistress of the girls’ school, Sarah Burrton, a 40ish progressive, self-confident woman returning to Yorkshire after years of teaching in London. There are many characters, and the plot involves many elements. Several South Riding county aldermen are prominently involved. The most prominent is Robert Carne, a conservative and manly gentleman-farmer, struggling to make ends meet because his wife is in an asylum and trying to bring up his daughter alone. Carne and Burton’s relationship figures prominently and, while there are Jane Eyre elements in the story, their relationship follows its own path. I thought that the relationship events and emotions were quite intriguing and unique. This is the story of a multitude of characters, flawed and imperfect as may be' yet with an undeniable charm. Be it Carne, a traditionalist who doesn't want to be pitied for his crumbling finances or Sarah Burton, the fiery headmistress who has modern reforms in mind yet hopelessly in love with her fiercest opponent, or Lydia Holly, who has to give up her education or Madame Hubbard who teaches young girls to dance ti ridiculous songs, every character will earn a place in your heart. I must add this is the first book I have read on local government and workings of the village council in the countryside, hence was refreshing and informative.

South Riding by Winifred Holtby | Goodreads South Riding by Winifred Holtby | Goodreads

Born in 1898 on the cusp of the 20th-century, Winifred Holtby was a thoroughly modern woman. Hailing from Rudston in the East Riding of Yorkshire, Holtby was a feminist campaigner, a civil rights supporter and a socialist – as well as a highly regarded journalist and author. Rudston and East Riding There’s a lot going on in this book, and Holtby has a clean style that keeps the story moving and focused on the most interesting moments in the characters’ lives. I’ve seen this book criticized for the space devoted to mundane aspects of adult life--the book focuses as much on the characters’ working lives as their personal ones--but that’s one of the reasons I loved it. It avoids well-trodden novelistic paths: most of the characters are middle-aged or older, and first love doesn’t appear even as a subplot. In large part it’s a novel about work and why it matters; anyone who hopes to make a difference with their career will empathize with Sarah Burton’s struggle to make a difference in her school and her occasional doubts about whether her work is important enough in the scheme of things.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. Holtby was buried in All Saints' churchyard in Rudston, East Yorkshire, just yards from the house in which she was born. Her epitaph is "God give me work till my life shall end and life till my work is done". [17] Vera Brittain wrote about her friendship with Holtby in her book Testament of Friendship (1940) and in 1960 published a censored edition of their correspondence. [16] Their letters, along with many of Holtby's other papers, were donated in 1960 to Hull Central Library in Yorkshire and are now held at the Hull History Centre. Other papers are in Bridlington library in Yorkshire, in McMaster University Library in Canada and in the University of Cape Town library in South Africa. A biography of Holtby by Marion Shaw, The Clear Stream, was published in 1999 and draws on a broad range of sources. Claudia FitzHerbert Who needed who most? The complex bond between Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby Throughout their correspondence, the fragile Brittain is often painfully demanding – but the role of devoted supporter seems to gratify Holtby

Winifred Holtby: author, feminist, campaigner - The Guardian Winifred Holtby: author, feminist, campaigner - The Guardian

Episode 1, Winifred Holtby - South Riding Omnibus - BBC Radio 4 Extra". BBC . Retrieved 23 September 2017.Although she never returned to Yorkshire to live, Holtby’s flourishing writing career explored the impact of the inter-war period on its rural and agricultural society.

Who needed who most? The complex bond between Vera Brittain

This was a book of meta-fiction. Her mother wouldn’t read the book and tried to stop its publication. As a memoirist, she was frank and modest to a fault. An article from 1934, “Mother Knows Best”, includes the admission that: “I am one of the very few women I know who went to Oxford because my mother wished it.” She described her early efforts at creating plays with her sister, the most extreme of which featured adultery, leprosy, suicide and murder. “The only form of composition which I chose for myself, insisted upon producing, and performed against odds, was that of writing plays. Is it wholly irrelevant that this is the only kind in which I have had no success whatever? I still write plays; I still send them to producers; they are still rejected.” In the Manchester Guardian in 1928 she called for a “new personal pronoun” so that women would not be “continually labelled madam”, and made a prescient case with regard to women and work. The article, titled “Counting the Cost”, declared it absurd to pretend there was no price, for husbands and children, of wives and mothers going out to work: “The real question to ask is: Are the gains worthwhile?” Her literary criticism, too, is full of wonderful sentences. “Those who hold Dostoyevsky to be one of the world’s greatest novelists, a man of deep and tragic perception, a doctor of souls gifted with a sombre intensity of spiritual insight, must read with anguish these long, rambling, egotistic, and quite appallingly unpleasant letters,” she wrote of the Russian writer’s correspondence. In another review, for Good Housekeeping, of a book about ageing by an American psychiatrist, she sent herself up deliciously as “a spinster of 36 (with a hip measurement of 42 – I measured it this morning after reading an unusually apocalyptic and terrifying corset catalogue)”. She demolished Somerset Maugham’s view of marriage as an end in itself as 'flatly immoral' Much like Middlemarch by George Eliot and The Warden by Anthony Trollope. Which commentate on social institutions such as church, and small town government. I would argue, South Riding falls into the same category.Bostridge, Mark (15 March 2012). "The story of the friendship between Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 29 March 2012. 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. Without emotion, without haste, without even, so far as Lovell could discern, any noticeable interest, the South Riding County Council ploughed through its agenda. The General mumbled; the clerk shuffled papers, the chairman of committees answered desultory questions”