South Riding

Product Information

Winifred Holtby, The Crowded Street, 1924 The Old Barracks, Scarborough, 1914 © Historic England Archive. The history of Robert Carne’s wife and her internment in an asylum is very much the way the middle classes dealt with mental ill health. 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. Holtby passed the entrance exam for Oxford’s Somerville College in 1917 but, deeply influenced by her experiences and personal beliefs, chose to take up war work instead. She raved about an anthology of memoirs of the unemployed that moved her, and zeroed in on the genocidal implications of an imperialist documentary short film.

Who needed who most? The complex bond between Vera Brittain

Sweeping themes, a broad canvas, a wide cast of complex characters, vivid landscapes combined with the wide ranging story with its passion, jealousy, regret, ambition, religion, and the all too human frailty make it a compelling 20th century epic.

Winifred Holtby, Anderby Wold, 1924 Two agricultural workers weeding a large field in East Riding of Yorkshire © Historic England. Its length and the varied and large array of characters reminded me of Victorian novelists like Eliot and Dickens. Describing a book as the great novel of 1930s English local government and regional newspapers, is not the most ringing of endorsements.

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

These experiences during the First World War would only strengthen Holtby’s lifelong beliefs in pacifism and civil rights. All her novels, together with a collection of short stories and a collection of her journalism, were reprinted by Virago in the Virago Modern Classics series in the 1980s. South Riding is set in Yorkshire in the first half of the 1930′s, focusing on the everyday lives of the people who live there. The characters go through hard times and experience tragedy, but that is because life is hard rather than because someone is plotting against them.It's also about Sarah Burton who's probably the best character I've ever encountered in all of literature. As well as her journalism, Holtby wrote 14 books, including six novels; two volumes of short stories; the first critical study of Virginia Woolf (1932) and Women and a changing civilization (1934), a feminist survey with opinions that are still relevant.

South Riding: An English Landscape (Virago Modern Classics)

Holtby wrote parts of the novel in Hull’s library, and watched council meetings from the public gallery of the Guildhall.Holtby's fame was derived mainly from her journalism: she wrote for more than 20 newspapers and magazines, including the feminist journal Time and Tide (also serving on the board of directors) and the Manchester Guardian newspaper. 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. Though her prose is pedestrian in places, there is a bleak, brave quality to her writing, and certain passages are desperately wrenching. 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. I also appreciated the fact that, although people struggle and fight with one another, there is no cruel, cackling villain in this book.