South Riding is also a story about loss and grief and how one faces the future after such an overwhelming pain! As the villagers of South Riding adjust to Sarah's arrival and face the changing world, emotions run high, prejudices are challenged and community spirit is tested. The pair wrote to each other often, first during their university vacations, and later when they were separated by their travels and by Brittain’s marriage to a stuffy academic, Gordon Catlin, who was then working in the US.

Who needed who most? The complex bond between Vera Brittain

Her father was David Holtby and her mother, Alice, was afterwards the first alderwoman on the East Riding County Council. Her careful appreciation of Woolf’s The Waves showed her to be as keen to engage with the formal experiments of modernism as the politics of the day. There are a large number of significant characters and the main characters don’t appear in large portions of the novel. Holtby takes a community in Yorkshire and, using the framework of its local government, builds up a narrative which tells the stories of many people in the community, all intertwined. Photograph: BBC Anna Maxwell Martin as Sarah Burton in the 2011 BBC adaptation of South Riding by Winifred Holtby.

The book is set in the fictional South Riding of Yorkshire: the inspiration being the East Riding rather than South Yorkshire; Holtby's mother, Alice, was the first alderwoman on the East Riding County Council. 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. Remarkably this novel was completely shortly before Holtby's own death, she imagines vividly the lives and potentials of characters far older and worn than she would ever be herself.

South Riding by Winifred Holtby, Marion Shaw | Waterstones South Riding by Winifred Holtby, Marion Shaw | Waterstones

Bellows, who’s friends with Carne and champions Burton, which is an especially effective and warm portrayal. Because of this pattern we are pushed away from identifying with any one character and obliged to look for their connections instead and we have to accept that some things are happening off the page for characters that might be alluded to in some narratives, but not shown directly to the reader. 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. About 1926, after the General Strike in England and its failure, after the entry of Germany into the League of Nations and the delay by the Powers in making good their promises, the slump in idealism began to set in. One of the symptoms of Bright’s Disease is crippling back pain, and she suffered from that and fatigue while writing this book.for whatever reason I thought it was clever at the time, when I was growing to really like Sarah Burton, the headmistress of the school for girls in South Riding: I was born to be a spinster, and by God, I’m going to spin. South Riding follows these characters (and more*--it’s a story about an entire community) over two years, with chapters alternating among various characters. This isn’t a book about politicking, but it is a story involving local government during a time of economic depression, and Holtby’s progressive beliefs do shine through in the way the characters think about their world and the effects of their decisions. p.380) (knitted bed jackets, imitation fruits, lampshades, painted vases etc), the diverted passions of Sarah Burton into education or of Alderman Beddows into the local council suggest a way forward, social change eventually leading towards a society that if not good for all is at least better. Although the novel moves at a leisurely pace and Holtby’s writing had me reading more slowly than usual, the time was well worth it.

South Riding: An English Landscape (Virago Modern Classics)

Carne's daughter Midge - the same age as Lydia but from a very different background is rather wild, her mother is in a mental hospital, for a time the girls come togther under the watchful eye of the new headmistress Sarah Burton. He's deeply concerned with slum clearance and has devoted himself to ridding South Riding of a row of shacks where the poor live. She was active in the Independent Labour Party and was a staunch campaigner for the unionisation of black workers in South Africa, during which she had considerable contact with Leonard Woolf. Having suffered from poor health for several years, Holtby was diagnosed with Bright’s disease in 1932 and died in London in 1935, aged just 37.The characterization is simply brilliant; there are a lot of characters, but I never once lost track of who was who nor forgot anyone's particular plot thread.

South Riding by Winifred Holtby | Hachette UK

The cast of this novel is huge, with more than a hundred characters (listed handily after the introduction), but it never feels overpopulated or confusing. Without emotion, without haste, without even, so far as Lovell could discern, any noticeable interest, the South Riding County Council ploughed through its agenda.The series won both the BAFTA and the Broadcasting Press Guild awards for Best Drama Series in 1975.