South Riding

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The individual will seems unimportant, the individual personality is dwarfed, by happenings on so large a scale . This deceptively gentle volume somehow gets to the heart of the matter, which has to do not only with need and approval, confidence and competition, but also with (sorry to bring this up) the patriarchy. Besides the fate of Burton and Carne, the fate and effective functioning of the whole of South Riding is at stake, resulting in various side plots.

South Riding by Winifred Holtby – review | Classics | The

This passion for imparting information to females appears to be one of the major male characteristics,” she quipped, adopting the lofty tone of an anthropologist, more than 70 years before such behaviour was christened “mansplaining”. Winifred Holtby was a committed socialist and feminist who wrote the classic South Riding as a warm yet sharp social critique of the well-to-do farming community she was born into. One of the symptoms of Bright’s Disease is crippling back pain, and she suffered from that and fatigue while writing this book.

Many have heard of the Brontë sisters, but are you familiar with Winifred Holtby, one of Yorkshire’s lesser-known literary daughters? The outside performance put on by Madam Hubbard’s girls, at which cast and audience alike spend more time focusing on their own individual thoughts and agendas than the show, is an absolute masterpiece. Subversion is also there in other ways, one of the charms of the book are the relationships between women, particularly between Sarah Burton and elderly Alderman Emma Beddows.

South Riding by Winifred Holtby | Hachette UK

That chapter “Two in a Hotel Are Insane” is one of the most exquisite and excruciating sequences in literature; it contains so much anguish, grief, pleasure and pain, and it all feels so real that I’m curious as to whether Holtby had a similar experience. This is a rich novel, full of nuanced well-drawn characters, touching on important societal issues, all told with sharply worded observations by Holtby. However Miss Burton's underwear will be likewise appraised and appreciated but not by a lover but by an awestruck pupil, and when she does win a night with the saturnine and manly Carne, they have a few pages together brilliant to the reader but not so for them. This may make the novel sound rather bleak, and it’s definitely not without its bleak moments, but there is also a great deal of comedy in this book.

Winifred Holtby realised that Local Government is not a dry affair of meetings and memoranda:- but 'the front-line defence thrown up by humanity against its common enemies of sickness, pove.

South Riding by Winifred Holtby | Goodreads South Riding by Winifred Holtby | Goodreads

Holtby also maintained a friendship with the wood engraver Clare Leighton (the sister of Vera Brittain’s fiance) and stayed at the house Leighton and her partner built at Monks Risborough in the Chilterns, immortalised in Leighton’s book ‘Four Hedges’. 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. Both books shared a notion of hereditary and particularly of decay, in Jane this comes from race or nation, here instead it is vested in social status, it is the titled aristocracy who are polluted and polluting, nothing apparently can be done for them, apart from to keep them eventually in care homes, they are essentially too high-strung, over sensitive, incapable probably of truly appreciating a proper cup of tea.Tom and Lily’s relationship broke my heart time and time again, and they are relatively minor characters (if there can be said to be such a thing in this novel). 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. There is a huge cast of characters, complex and flawed, such as Alderman Emma Beddows, it illustrates the repercussions of the enormous loss of men in WW1, and covers local government politics. I don't even know where to begin except that I hope I'm her and I want to be her when becoming myself.

Winifred Holtby - Wikipedia

Alexander Korda produced South Riding and director Victor Saville got great performances out of his whole cast, especially from Ralph Richardson. Set in the fictional South Riding, with much of the story concerning local poitics, and the different characters and factions associated with the county council, alongside other local people. In her story of the imaginary 'South Riding' of Yorkshire, she strove to preserve for us a part of the changing England that is typical of the whole.Another councilor Milton Rosmer sees a quick shilling or two to be made in making sure he owns the land the houses are to be built on. As with much of her writing, it depicts a rural community’s struggle against the hardship of the 1930s economic depression and brings to life the people and places Winifred had known best, in the Yorkshire Wolds of her childhood. Robert Carne is a gentleman-farmer, struggling to make ends meet because his wife is in an asylum (an expensive one) and trying to bring up his daughter alone. 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.