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Winifred Holtby
Virago 2009
South Riding resembles Middlemarch in that it gives a picture of a precise provincial locality at a particular time through a depiction of a variety of characters. Its focus is the local council of the fictional South Riding of Yorkshire in the early years of the nineteen thirties. It is divided into eight parts, each relating to some aspect of the council's business: health, education, housing and so on. This summary makes it sound somewhat less than riveting, but actually it is an engrossing read. This is partly because of a story which occasionally strays close to melodrama: a handsome bluff farmer who has risked all for love; his wife, a wild and unpredictable scion of the nobility now wasting away in an asylum; a passionate and idealistic young headmistress torn between head and heart. Partly it's because the majority of characters are drawn so well, and so convincingly, and partly because, as with George Eliot, Holtby's strong and humane convictions are forcibly expressed and make this more reflective than the predictable romantic potboiler it could so easily have been. Much of the novel is clearly based on her own experience: obviously the idealism of the headmistress but also, it seems, the depiction of the woman resigning herself to terminal disease - for, by the time this novel was published, Holtby was already dead - of kidney disease, aged just thirty-seven. Although this novel won't be to everybody's taste, I really enjoyed it. The picture it gives of the thirties - a society struggling to cope with the aftermath of the first world war while aware of rise of fascism in Europe which portends another, housing developments which replace squalid slums but give opportunities for municipal corruption, the leftwing idealism of the time - reminded me of novels by Patrick Hamilton and Orwell. However, where this surprisingly frank novel is perhaps most interesting is in its depiction of the gradual emancipation of women and its effect on the relationship between the sexes. If all this sounds worthy but dull, fear not though: this is a real page turner, and it is easy to see why it was such a success when first published.
15 February 2010
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jholtby.htm
See also: The Crowded Street
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