South Riding

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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. The book examines the inner workings of the county and school board bureaucracy and issues such as welfare payments to the poor, eradication of slums, education, health, mental illness and political corruption. A really good story unfolding the daily life of a small community with its struggles and triumphs, sorrows and joys! I love that Holtby shows us the inner lives of people from all walks of life and all circumstances—slumdwellers, middle class, crumbling aristocracy, the healthy, the infirm, the married, the single, politicians, journalists, teachers, students, adults, children—so that we as readers really get a feel for the character of the South Riding.

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

There are those that put themselves out on a limb, those who play safe and those who go brazenly, headfirst, out in battle. Where else, in a world that is so often against her, is a woman supposed to find solidarity but with a sympathetic, like-minded sister? They didn’t meet as students so much as collide, Holtby having crashed into the study where they were both to have a tutorial – and Brittain did not care for her at first. The alert amongst you will have noticed something about the two main characters; a touch of the Jane Eyre’s perhaps.For me that’s a plus; literature should deal with big ideas, and the structure of society and purpose of government are certainly that. Sarah Burton, the fiery young headmistress of the local girls' school; Mrs Beddows, the district's first alderwoman—based on Holtby's own mother; and Robert Carne, the conservative gentleman-farmer locked in a disastrous marriage—with whom the radical Sarah Burton falls in love. Holtby was the author of five other novels, the anti-fascist play Take Back Your Freedom, two collections of short stories, the first critical study of Virginia Woolf and a history of feminism, written at a time when the women’s liberation struggle is widely seen as having been in retreat, caught between its first and second waves. Moreover, the further one reads, the easier it becomes to immediately recognize who is speaking or being referred to.

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

Jane Thomas believes Holtby’s reputation has suffered in part because she is seen as an “old-fashioned realist” working against the grain of modernism. Other literary contemporaries at Somerville College included Hilda Reid, Margaret Kennedy and Sylvia Thompson.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. Sarah thinks she is is a brilliant child full of promise but which will be wasted as since her mother has died she will be dragged from school to become principal carer for her younger siblings (the father is a charming rascal who can barely hold down a job let alone run a household). After Oxford, they flatshared in Bloomsbury, and for the rest of Holtby’s life, they more often lived together than not, an arrangement that didn’t change even after Brittain married and had children; eventually, Holtby moved in with her and Catlin, taking over the childcare when they were away. Reissued to tie in with the forthcoming Andrew Davies adaptation for the BBC, Winifred Holtby's last and best-known novel is a sprawling portrait of provincial life in England between the wars. See also ‘Testament of a Generation: The Journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby’ published in 1985.

Winifred Holtby - South Riding - Episode BBC Radio 4 Extra - Winifred Holtby - South Riding - Episode

It stars Anna Maxwell Martin, David Morrissey, Peter Firth, Douglas Henshall, Penelope Wilton and John Henshaw. She built her story around six people working for a typical County Council:- Beneath the lives of the public servants runs the thread of their personal drama. The main character, Sarah Burton is a dynamic, headstrong schoolteacher with refreshing ideas about girls getting ahead through education.I want to be about the work in which my real interests lie … But while … injustice is done and opportunity denied to the great majority of women, I shall have to be a feminist.