South Riding is a rich, panoramic novel, bringing vividly to life a rural community on the brink of change. It is partly based on Holtby’s mothers experience as an alderman and on her experience of local government (her mother opposed her writing the novel).

Winifred Holtby Between Friends: Letters of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby

South Riding combines the countryside of her youth with her progressive political views, to create a sprawling and satisfying picture of life in the area around Hull (here disguised as Kingsport) during the depression. The only form of composition which I chose for myself, insisted upon producing, and performed against odds, was that of writing plays. On the whole it’s a positive and hopeful book, but there is a lot of illness and dying here; the author was terminally ill when she wrote it, and it’s hard not to imagine something of Holtby in Astell, who is desperate to accomplish his work before illness keeps him from it.Representing the eternal battle between Sarah Burton and the spiritual ideals of progress, education, leading forth into a world of Enlightenment versus Carne representing the fleshly principles of paying less tax, the natural rhythms of the agricultural world, the fleeting earthly pleasures of wielding sharp agricultural implements to get the harvest in and Angina Pectoris. We see the few chances given to women and the sacrifices made by many bright young girls, the hardship and the poverty and the desperation of those finding themselves in difficulty.

Winifred Holtby and the Yorkshire Wolds The Story of Winifred Holtby and the Yorkshire Wolds

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. As with much of her writing, it depicts a rural community’s struggle against the hardship of the 1930s economic depression and brings to life the people and places Winifred had known best, in the Yorkshire Wolds of her childhood. 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.The books featured on this site are aimed primarily at readers aged 13 or above and therefore you must be 13 years or over to sign up to our newsletter.

South Riding by Winifred Holtby, Marion Shaw | Waterstones South Riding by Winifred Holtby, Marion Shaw | Waterstones

He is conservative, reactionary, enamoured of the old ways of farming, a keen hunter and essentially patriarchal. This article was amended on 6 December 2022 to clarify some details about Brittain’s nursing service during the war. In a letter of 1921, Brittain prefaces some compliments she wants to relay to Holtby with the comment that Mrs Leighton (Roland’s mother) said she was “not in the least pretty”. One of the symptoms of Bright’s Disease is crippling back pain, and she suffered from that and fatigue while writing this book.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. This is the slump complex - this narrowing of ambition, this closing-in alike of ideas and opportunities. During this period, Holtby met Harry Pearson, the only man who stimulated romantic feelings in her, due primarily to his tales of the suffering soldiers endured during the war.

BBC One - South Riding BBC One - South Riding

In her first novel, Anderby Wold, she explores the impact of radical politics and social change on a traditional farming community. Beddows, the competent female alderman (modeled on Holtby’s mother, I believe) stuck in a disappointing marriage, finding fulfillment in her friendship with Robert Carne. If she did not satisfactorily resolve the question of childcare, saying only that “various arrangements” were needed, nor have we nearly 90 years on. in response to Sarah’s favorite quotation from Lady Rhondda: “Take it and pay for it”—also the epigraph of the novel) is that everyone pays. The poignant story of Sarah and Robert Carne is the one at the centre of the novel, is wonderfully romantic on the one hand without ever descending into sentimentality.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. She was buried in October 1935 in All Saintschurchyard in the village where she had been born, below the rolling fields of the Wolds which had so inspired her life and her writing. While the novel undoubtedly remains a fascinating depiction of a time and place, it is more than that.