Alongside the domestic concerns of the likes of Hollys, Holtby is also keen to delve into the workings of local government – both as a catalyst for social improvement and a vehicle for abuse and corruption.

A twelfth impression of the true first edition, published as the First Cheap Edition (as stated on the dustwrapper) in September, 1938. The book enjoyed much positive attention from the time it was published, becoming a true modern class for its complexity, readability, attention to the details of everyday life, and observations of human nature.

A good education is the best route out of poverty for Lydia, just as it proved to be the making of Sarah herself. With her flaming red hair and forthright nature, Sarah is far from the archetypal mousy spinster; instead she is bright, optimistic and fiercely committed to the development of young women.

g the dynamic between tradition and progression; the need/desire for women to be more than wives and mothers; the hardships of rural life in the early 20th century…etc. In some ways I wish I’d discovered it as a young girl, closer in age to Lydia Holly than I am these days.As you read you will stumble upon beautiful phrases such as "slapped the kettle on the stove" and "fastened it at the throat with a cameo brooch" strewn over a slow narrative. I will say that about a third of the way through I was comparing it to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio, which I loved. There is a very humane quality to Winifred Holtby's writing: characters who in another novel might have served as boo-hiss villains for failing to live up to their claims of virtue, like the Reverend Huggins who cheats on his wife and becomes embroiled in a land scheme, instead are written with sympathy and allowed their strengths as well as weaknesses (Huggins is sincerely appalled by poverty and injustice and fights against it). In the tv version, Sarah still had her wartime romance but never loved another man since (though as she informs another character "there were other men - none of them meant anything!

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 both cases, said night takes place in a hotel and before it gets to anything sexual, he has a breakdown due to being sick with the result that they don't have sex but she nurses him through the night and they part being mutually highly embarrassed for different reasons. asylum in Harrogate; the other half he divided between Maythorpe, his horses, and his daughter (if she was his daughter), Midge.While Carne appears formal and proud, there is a softer, more humane side to his personality too – one that Sarah discovers as she gets to know him better. A score of other themes, each with its own individuality, are woven into the amazingly rich and complex pattern of South Riding. A supporter of Sarah’s, Emma Beddows appears to hold something of a candle for Robert Crane, viewing him as a potential partner in spite of their differences in age.

And it is chance that makes progressive, idealistic Burton fall in love with the local squire Robert Carne, a symbolic figure of reaction, who opposes the expansion of local government and the widespread benefits it would bring. Yes, i remember it being a British production, shown on US tv by PBS as part of the Masterpiece Theater series, back in the 80s.

Winifred Holtby (23 Jun 1898 - 29 Sep 1935) was an English novelist and journalist, now best known for her novel "South Riding", which was posthumously published in 1936. But if Carne is in some ways a modern Rochester (and in the novel as opposed to the tv version, this is even lampshaded because of course Sarah has read Jane Eyre and the comparison occurs to her), the relationship goes another way.