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After the death of her fiancé, an ambitious young woman returns home to a depressed, post-World War I Yorkshire village to become headmistress of the local girls' school.
thorold: Sarah Burton and Miss Sparling may be poles apart in political terms, but it's fun to see how much Thirkell's idea of a headmistress overlaps with Holtby's, despite that.
“We're so busy resigning ourselves to the inevitable that we don't even ask if it is inevitable. We've got to have courage, to take our future into our hands. If the law is oppressive, we must change the law. If tradition is obstructive, we must break tradition. If the system is unjust, we must reform the system.”
This is a classic novel set in a village in Yorkshire, the author’s home county, first published in 1936 after Holtby had died at age 36 of kidney disease. The book takes in a range of issues such as local politics, socialism, poverty, and the impact of the war and the influenza pandemic. It also has a colourful array of characters: the village councillors, in particular, the feisty female alderman Mrs Beddows, the straying minister Huggins, and returned spinster school ma’am Sarah Burton. Holtby describes the villagers with wit and charm reminiscent of Jane Austen.
Sarah is a strong, feminist character with modern ideals and a zest for life, who finds herself attracted to Robert Carne, a struggling conservative upper class landowner who is battling with the financial challenge of maintaining his estate, dealing with his institutionalised wife and with his own failing health. Sarah deals with her own work-related challenges: a frustrated scientist become science teacher, a talented student whose impoverished home situation steals her opportunities, and Robert’s turbulent daughter Midge.
I loved the writing in this book. Strangely I usually detest writers that use tell instead of show techniques but this story illustrates that it can be done well with some humour and insight. I have not seen the TV mini-series connected with this, but am now inspired to do so. What a shame this author’s life was so tragically cut short, she seems like a fascinating person. ( )
A glorious tapestry of lives and ambitions, populating a small community over two years with their loves, intrigues, greed, and tragedy. Punctuated by occasional speechifying. Over the whole thing hangs the knowledge that Holtby was gravely ill and only finished the novel a month before she died. ( )
This felt a bit like an updated Trollope. It had been on my To Be Read list for a long time. I'm very glad I finally got to it. Good characters (something I'm always looking for). Interesting look at small town politics in Britain between the wars. A good read, though not a quick one. ( )
Full disclosure: I began [South Riding] in mid-August this year of covid, 2020, and I have only finished it now at the end of November. Why did I put it down? Because of the times we are in and my own state of mind, yes. In earlier days (what we call "Before Times" around here) I would not have put it down, although, as I will get to, I would note the shift in tone about 2/3rds through the book and I would add that the shift disappointed me. It's a curious feature of novel-writing that you write along mining a vein for awhile, but then you come along to, exactly as in real life, a crucial moment when a choice must be made and what you then, as the writer, decide your characters will do or how they will react to an event (even if you choose to say, "the character made me do it") the book will definitively move into a final direction. Sometimes the shift is highly original and intriguing, or breathtaking, expanding outward into the unknown, at other times, there is a failure of nerve or imagination and the protagonist doesn't take the leap, choose to fold back on his or herself, there are thousands of ways these choices can play out so that sometimes the choice to fold inward, becomes (somehow) an expanding outward. This, is, I think what Holtby intended and that is pretty much exactly where I put the book down, overwhelmed. Embedded within this story of a town in Yorkshire, the new headmistress of the girl's school, the town council and the growing pains in the early 1930's of the area. is a love story. Well, several love stories, but only one is central. Robert Carne, the local squire, wants to maintain things as they are, but his life is a mess, his wife mad and requiring housing in an institution. She is a true aristocrat (whereas Carne is of the olde landed gentry ilk and this marriage was a disaster for all concerned.) He runs his farms well, but the expenses of his wife's care have ruined him. Schemes abound but Carne, caught up in his belief in his way of life, cannot see that he must change, compromise orlose. Two women adore Carne, an older woman, Mrs. Beddows, also a Councilwoman and the new headmistress who reluctantly falls in love with him. The best story here, the most original and moving, is the love Mrs. Beddows holds for Robert Carne, twenty years her junior. I went back to the novel at last for her sake. There is a moment where she admits to the younger woman, the headmistress, that her love for Carne has been confusing, that you look in the mirror and see three score and ten, but inside you're just a girl. I'm old enough now to know that and know how poignant an emotion that is. Well worth reading, this novel. Worth also knowing that Holtby was dying as she finished this, her last, and I do think the choice she made, to turn inward, was part of her own reconciliation with her approaching death. ****1/2 ( )
This novel rivals Middlemarch for its microcosmic view of English rural life and its insights into the characters who inhabit their particular area of the countryside. Several of the covers offer a woman's face, suggesting that Sarah Burton is the focal point of the novel, but I am afraid pigeonholes this novel as a story just as a woman's novel when it is far better than that. Just as Middlemarch is more than Dorothea Brooks, South Riding is about human nature and how even the most ordinary of us struggle to make the best of our limitations, whether they be physical, intellectual, or spiritual. Flawed as we all are, our commonalities make us a community worth fighting for, not blindly, but as fully grounded in our values as possible.And what is best about this book is that it does not minimize those flaws, or the personal pain and guilt we inflict upon ourselves for being flawed. As one character tells another, "'And who are you to think you could get through life without pain? Did you expect never to be ashamed of yourself? Of course this hurts you. And it will go on hurting. You needn't believe much what they say about time healing. I've had seventy years and more of time and there are plenty of things in my life still won't bear thinking of. You've just got to get along as best you can with all your shames and sorrows and humiliations. Maybe in the end it's those things arte most use to you." It is up to each of us to decide what we will do about our shames, sorrows and humiliations, but the novel makes clear that we all have to carry them forward with us. ( )
Holtby understood the necessity of conveying progressive ideas to the widest possible readership, of the kind that Woolf scorned in her essay "The Middlebrow".
"Take what you want," said God. "Take it---and pay for it."
Old Spanish Proverb Quoted in This Was My World by Viscountess Rhondda.
"I tell the things I know, the things I knew Before I knew them, immemorially; And as the fieldsman with unhurrying tread Trudges with steady and unchanging pace, Being born to clays that in the winter hold, So my pedestrian measure gravely plods Telling a loutish life."
V. Sackville-West The Land.
Dedication
First words
Young Lovell Brown, taking his place for the first time in the Press Gallery of the South Riding County Hall at Flintonbridge, was prepared to be impressed by everything.
Winifred Holtby, who had met my mother in the autumn of 1919, when both were students at Somerville College, Oxford, was, like her, a writer. (Preface)
In February 1935 Winifred Holtby, staying in Hornsea on the Yorkshire coast in order to escape the distractions and fatigue of life in London, wrote to her friend Vera Brittain to say that she had received 'a very nice letter from Virginia Woolf asking if I would like to write an autobiography for the Hogarth Press'. (Introduction)
South Riding is the last novel that Winifred Holtby will write. (Epitaph)
Quotations
I was born to be a spinster, and by God, I'm going to spin.
Last words
She saw that gaiety, that kindliness, that valour of the spirit, beckoning her on from a serene old age.
It is the great epic of local government, a monument to the tens of thousands who serve their fellow human beings at the grassroots where things grow. (Preface)
Even though Winifred believed there would be another war, South Riding gives an assurance, perhaps a qualified one, that the communal efforts that have achieved these advances will survive. (Introduction)
'The splendours of the firmament of time May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not; Like stars to their appointed height they climb And death is a low mist which cannot blot The brightness it may veil.' (Epitaph)
After the death of her fiancé, an ambitious young woman returns home to a depressed, post-World War I Yorkshire village to become headmistress of the local girls' school.
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"Take what you want,' says God. 'Take it and pay for it,' 'Ah,' said Mrs. Beddows quietly. 'But who pays?'" This, Winifred Holtby's greatest work, is a rich and memorable evocation of the characters of the South Riding, their lives, loves and sorrow. There is Sarah Burton, fiery young headmistress, inspired by educational ideas; Robert Carne of Maythorpe Hall, a conservative councillor, tormented by his disastrous marriage; Jo Astell, a socialist fighting poverty and his own tuberculosis; Alf Huggins, haulage contractor and lay preacher of 'too, too solid flesh'; Mrs. Beddows, the first woman Alderman of the district, and the obsequious Snaith. These are the people who work together - and against one another - in council chambers and backroom caucuses. Alongside them are the men, women and children affected by their decisions: Tom Sawdon, landlord of the Nag's Head; the flamboyant Madame Hubbard of the local dancing school; young Lydia Holly who dreams of scholarship and many more.
Winifred Holtby (1893-1935), born at Rudston, Yorkshire, was a journalist, critic, feminist, pacifist and author of six novels, South Riding (1936), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, is 'a triumph of personality, a testament to its author's undaunted philosophy." - Vera Brittain
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South Riding
Wikipedia in English
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This is a classic novel set in a village in Yorkshire, the author’s home county, first published in 1936 after Holtby had died at age 36 of kidney disease. The book takes in a range of issues such as local politics, socialism, poverty, and the impact of the war and the influenza pandemic. It also has a colourful array of characters: the village councillors, in particular, the feisty female alderman Mrs Beddows, the straying minister Huggins, and returned spinster school ma’am Sarah Burton. Holtby describes the villagers with wit and charm reminiscent of Jane Austen.
Sarah is a strong, feminist character with modern ideals and a zest for life, who finds herself attracted to Robert Carne, a struggling conservative upper class landowner who is battling with the financial challenge of maintaining his estate, dealing with his institutionalised wife and with his own failing health. Sarah deals with her own work-related challenges: a frustrated scientist become science teacher, a talented student whose impoverished home situation steals her opportunities, and Robert’s turbulent daughter Midge.
I loved the writing in this book. Strangely I usually detest writers that use tell instead of show techniques but this story illustrates that it can be done well with some humour and insight. I have not seen the TV mini-series connected with this, but am now inspired to do so. What a shame this author’s life was so tragically cut short, she seems like a fascinating person. (