South Riding

This novel, written in 1934 and published posthumously in 1936, is set in a fictional part of Yorkshire (the south in fact refers to the maritime East Riding). The central character, Sarah Burton, has come back to her native county from London to become headmistress of a small school for girls. She brings with her a socialist mindset and she attempts to improve the conditions of the poorest in the community. Much of the action of the novel involves the local councillors, some conservative, including Robert Carne of the big house, some socialist. Carne’s personal life is tragic and Sarah sees him as something of a Mr Rochester as she grows in affection for him in spite of their political differences.

The author, Winifred Holtby (born 23 June 1898), grew up near the Yorkshire port of Bridlington. On finishing school, she had the option of a place in Somerville College, Oxford but chose instead to volunteer in early 1918 for service with the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. She was, however, only posted to France at the very end of the war. She took up her place in Oxford in 1919 and became a close friend of Vera Brittain — on graduating, they shared a home in London where they hoped to establish themselves as writers. Her first novel was published in 1923. She went on to write a further five novels and two volumes of short stories as well as some poetry (including some about Edward Brittain, Vera’s brother, who was killed in the war). This novel received critical acclaim and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 1936.

The central character, Sarah Burton, was tormented by what she had known of the First World War. The playing of patriotic songs at a civic function brought her to tears —
“For though, apart from the death of young Roy Carbery, she had suffered less from the war than many women, seen less of it, remained less keenly conscious of its long-drawn catastrophe, the farther it receded into the past, the less bearable its memory became. With increasing awareness every year she realised what it had meant of horror, desperation, anxiety and loss of her generation. She knew that the dead are most needed, not when they are mourned, but in a world robbed of their stabilising presence. Ten million men, she told herself, who should now have been between 40 and 45 — our scientists, our rulers, our philosophers, the foremen in our workshops, the headmasters in our schools — were mud and dust and the world did ill without them.”