South Riding: An English Landscape (1936)

Back to the 1930s, and a real authentic voice of that era with its wan and gawky kids, grimy townscapes, with women's prospects cut short by marriage, their worn-out bodies mending and tending to weak and frivolous menfolk. At the same time, a new secular, individualistic era is emerging, shaking off the proprieties and dead hand of the war. Still, emotions (the crippling legacy of the ‘Great War’) are not far submerged, and one is easily caught, as Mr Astell realises, in a “trap of humbug”. Holtby gives us sharply drawn landscapes and persons, but their portrayal has the cold, rather judgemental detachment one notes, in the same era and spirit, in Brecht.
And so the progressive, reformist ameliorism, that she depicts in Sarah, the dynamic force of the story, seems a bit insipid too; telling, then, that the traditionalist non-instrumentalist, duty-laden Carne is drawn as the book’s hero. Amidst a mass of heavy themes - decay of the old order, as well as the solidity and restraint of its traditions and ethos – the unhappy, unrequited love of Sarah for Carne, is welcome, but not fully convincing. ( )

I wanted to love this book, but a huge cast of characters involved with local Yorkshire politics—politics being a topic which I shrink away from—did not exactly win me over in the beginning. Soon, some key figures emerged, namely Sarah Burton, the new and youngish headmistress at the local high school and Robert Carne, a broke and principled landowner and descendant from a venerable family regarded locally as a lord, if not in actuality, then figuratively. Little by little, the politics took a secondary place and the various individuals became more fleshed out and I was eventually pulled in to their individual stories and struggles, in this poor community between the wars struggling to improve the lot of it's residents. I eventually found myself truly caring about Sarah and Carne, the modern and independent clever woman falling in love with the older man who is defeated by personal tragedy. And County Alderman Mrs Beddows, at first a mere figurehead to me, though an exception for being the first Alderman woman (apparently as Holtby's own mother was), a married septuagenarian more than a little bit in love with Carne too, earned my affection in the end. A book I feel I should have appreciated more than I did—and I did, just not to the full extent—which I may eventually revisit. There are excellent reviews for this novel, and the one just below mine on this page expresses all I could not manage to here. ( )

South Riding has been a prime example for me of the influence fellow bloggers can have over your reading habits. Hype generally puts me off a book, that and BBC screen adaptations (with the exception, of course, of The Crimson Petal and the White) however, I ended up reading so many glowing reviews of both the novel and the absorbing personal life of its author that I was blindsided into purchasing the highly attractive Virago reprint - apparently based on an old Yorkshire Railways poster, which is just superbly apt I think.

Being a Northerner, if not a Yorkshire-woman, myself and desperate to acquaint myself with all the real classics I have yet to read, this tale of a feisty, London headmistress landing in a remote part of Yorkshire to inspire the young, and often very poor local women, seemed right up my street. As I'm sure any of you acquainted with the author are aware, Winifred Holtby led an exceedingly interesting, highly politicised life but sadly died in her late thirties, with this novel published posthumously by intimate friend and author Vera Brittain.

Her portrait of an imagined portion of West Yorkshire, sorely suffering from the Depression and mammoth hangover of the first World War, seems largely considered to be her finest work and contains a cast of characters so large that, although many of you I'm sure will be disappointed with me saying this, my attention span began to waver as I was introduced to wave after wave of local government busybodies to get to grips with. Although headmistress Sarah Burton plays a key role in the shape and thrust of Holtby's narrative, it seems that the central character in this novel is the community itself, with people appearing to represent certain ideologies and types rather than the focus lying on the personal stories of the individuals themselves (I can practically hear everyone clamouring to disagree with me on this!) Although the backgrounds of Robert Carne, Sarah Burton, Lydia Holly and other, considerably less prominent personages are explored, I felt so overwhelmed by the minutiae of local politics and the ideologies at war (e.g Carne vs Burton = reactionary vs progressive) that my reading slightly suffered at its expense. Characters I felt I barely knew (e.g. Joe Astell and Sarah Burton) suddenly became the closest of friends with me left having little understanding of how their relationship reached such a point.

The politicised element to this book made complete sense once I found the time to read up on Holtby's own life and that of her mother; who was, unsurprisingly, the first female alderman in East Riding and a woman who was a model for the warmhearted yet influential Mrs Beddows, close friend and confidant of Robert Carne; a man for whom both she and Sarah Burton fall heavily (one more reluctantly and revealingly than the other.)

Putting my confusion and easily distracted reading of this book to one side; when Winifred Holtby chooses to zoom in on one particular event or person she does so beautifully, leaving me hungry for more. Her portrait of Lily Sawdon; a young, innkeeper's wife who is slowly and very quietly dying of cancer, is extremely moving and her stoicism and love for her husband touched me very deeply. These wonderful snippets left me desperate to know what giving them more room to breathe could have meant for characters such as Lydia Holly; so enticing yet, all the same, kept at arms length.

Despite my misgivings (probably not helped by the fact that I took this book on holiday - hardly a sun lounger read) there is no doubt that Holtby has succeeded in creating a remarkable and worthy portrait of hardy, humble yet stunning region of the country - a love letter to Yorkshire and its people if you don't mind that terrible cliché. It is easy when walking in the foothills and along the coasts of this region to fall into some kind of romance, but Holtby easily does away with this; speaking for plain, honest folk, some of whom (quite shockingly) lived in conditions akin to those in the slums of great industrial cities. With a strong female character at its centre, South Riding is worth a look, but, unlike me, I beg you do it in the right mood, in the right place and at the right time. What a travesty that this lady didn't hang around long enough on this earth to give us more...

http://relishreads.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/south-riding.html ( )

This is one of those books that regularly gets touted as a "forgotten masterpiece", quite ignoring the fact that the people it was written for have never stopped reading it.

Holtby may have been a left-wing intellectual and an admirer of Virginia Woolf, but she also understood the limitations of modernism. When she set out to write a final big social and political novel, setting out her ideas on social change and mortality, on idealism and greed, on feminism and tradition, on investment and prudence (and on all sorts of other things), she wasn't too proud to fall back on techniques borrowed from social realists like Arnold Bennett, J.B. Priestley and the great Victorians. There's not much room here for symbolism and streams of consciousness; soaring epiphanies are kept strictly under control and confined to the final chapters. The provincial setting and huge cast deliberately invite comparisons with Middlemarch, whilst the central love story is even more explicitly flagged to the reader as a parody of the plot of Jane Eyre. The message is pretty clear: it's no good being red unless you're read. Holtby knew it was futile to write books that would only be read by London intellectuals, so she planted her message in a book that would be enjoyed by readers not so different from the people she was writing about, whether they agreed with her or not. A very Yorkshire bit of pragmatism. Characters, stories, comedy, pathos, and a hint of romance may be there to sugar the pill, but it never feels like it: medium and message are married together quite as elegantly as anything that Priestley ever did, much more subtly than George Orwell could have managed it.

It must be thirty years since I last read it (I was prompted to pick it up again by Andrew Davies's dreadful new BBC adaptation, not a patch on the one Stan Barstow did for Yorkshire TV in the 70s). One thing that struck me quite forcefully on this re-reading was how much this is an attack on empty, cynical materialism. The characters who believe in something are all sympathetic, even when they believe in the wrong things (like Carne) or aren't strong enough to live up to their own ideals (like Huggins). Any bright, cynical modernist foolish enough to pick the book up would probably tiptoe gently away after seeing the scorn the author pours (without actually needing to say anything at all) on Carne's sister-in-law when she is rash enough to make a Cold Comfort Farm reference in Carne's presence. ( )

WARNING: This review contains spoilers.

****

I had a bit of a roller coaster ride with this book. At first it took a little while to get into, if only because it's told in a slower, shall we say more "pastoral" style. But the colourful cast of characters, plus dedicated reading time in a comfy armchair with a cup of tea at my elbow, soon had me fully immersed in between-the-wars Yorkshire. What especially helped matters was realizing that David Morrissey, one of my favourite actors, is playing Robert Carne in the Masterpiece Classic adaptation. So I became quite attached to Robert, especially because I found his character somewhat similar to Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility, whom DM played in the 2008 adaptation. DM's website describes Colonel Brandon as having "a strong but reserved nature and a sad past." This could equally apply to Carne, but Carne's financial prospects are a bit bleaker than Brandon's.

Because I get very attached to characters, it is no wonder the roller coaster crashed back down once I read about Carne's death ("he saw no more forever" almost made me sob out loud on the bus) and found myself fervently wishing that for once the TV adaptation would change the ending to make it happier for him and Sarah Burton. However, that would be unfaithful to the book, and his death does work as a climactic plot point, so there is no *real* reason to change it except my schoolgirlish fancies. And would I be wishing such a thing if it were someone other than DM playing him? Quite possibly not. So don't mind me.

But on to the rest of the book: Sarah Burton was also excellent. I like my female romantic leads to have some backbone to them, to be resourceful and clever and not spend all of their days chasing men. Yes she does become rather desperate for Carne once she realizes she's in love with him, but it's not as though she came to South Riding hoping to snag herself a member of the local gentry. Alderman Mrs. Beddows had some good lines as well, and all the various councillors who showed up all had their own distinct personalities. Holtby does an excellent job supplying each of her characters with colourful backstories and realistic motivations, and portrays their inner thoughts well. Her descriptions of settings also bring Yorkshire to life.

My main gripe with this book would be how the epilogue and the last bit of the last actual chapter got kind of preachy, with Sarah and Mrs. Beddows trading lofty platitudes that I started flipping past rather quickly. If there had been a way to end it more neatly, or at least on a more dramatic, firmer note, that would have boosted it to a four-star in my rating.

Recommended for people who enjoy between-the-wars fiction, lovers of Yorkshire, and people who like a dose of social commentary with their literature. ( )