South Riding

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If you’d like to read more about Winifred Holtby, this blog is indebted to Marion Shaw’s The Clear Stream: A Life of Winifred Holtby and John Markham’s Guide to Winifred Holtby Country . Ambitions, hypocrisy, triumphs and failures are shared amongst the people of South Riding and their moments of passion, tragedy and hope strengthen their bonds as they face a world that is on the brink of change. Aside from subversion the novel is about Public service and vocation, perhaps I might better say service as self actualisation, or maybe the other way round. 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. Vera Brittain, as a nurse in the first world war; Winifred Holtby, in a studio portrait for the Bystander magazine, 1933.

Who needed who most? The complex bond between Vera Brittain

In this book, nobody is as good as you would initially think them to be, and nobody is as bad as you would initially think them to be. Polemical short stories such as “Why Herbert Killed His Mother” and “Maternal Instinct” belong there too.

Sarah Burton is especially memorable: she’s a spinster in her late 30s, but she’s not a damaged or pitiable figure; she’s energetic and optimistic, sociable and engaged with other people. But swiftly one has to admit to Holtby's subversive drive, once the hopeless science teacher Miss Agnes Sigglesthwaite BSc has resigned and finds alternative employment as a ladies companion reading romantic fiction to her chair bound employer, Miss Burton MA, Headmistress extraordinaire amuses herself with the thought of Sigglesthwaite stumbling in her reading over unfamiliar words for varieties of Ladies underwear not within the vocabulary of a 1930s maiden school teacher. And then there are the ones that make you feel as if the author had extended a hand and held yours, that for the duration of your reading, you found a mirror so perfect it validated everything you'd been and everything you wished to be.

South Riding by Winifred Holtby – review | Classics | The

Other literary contemporaries at Somerville College included Hilda Reid, Margaret Kennedy and Sylvia Thompson.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. In Women and a changing civilisation Holtby linked the 1930s reaction against feminism to a broader "revolt against reason which has affected the intellectual life of the entire Western World". She described her early efforts at creating plays with her sister, the most extreme of which featured adultery, leprosy, suicide and murder.