Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1533108 in Books
• Published on: 1974-09-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Customer Reviews

An English classic
Winifred Holtby, who died at a tragically young age, came from a generation scarred by the First World War, and determined to build a better future.

It is not difficult to see the author represented in the main character, Sarah Burton, an idealistic, headstrong young woman who comes to a small Yorkshire coastal town in the Thirties to take up a post as headmistress in the local girls school. The book deals enthrallingly and movingly with Sarah, her love for the doomed landowner Robert Carne, and the people she encounters along the way.

South Riding is a dearly-loved book, full of passion and poetry and humour. It deserves to be much better known than it is. The book was the last and greatest work of its young author and I recommend you read it.

"Oh, lovely world," thought Sarah, in love with life and all its varied richness.
First of all, thank you very much to the friend who pointed me towards this book in the first place. I will confess that I had never even heard of Winifred Holtby, and now I have no idea why that would be the case.

South Riding is wonderful, and that simple description does not do it justice. The only thing that I am sorry about is that I have apparently begun with her best work. South Riding was begun late in her life (finished just before her too young death at 37 of kidney failure). It is tempting to think that perhaps an awareness of her coming death is part of what makes the book so fine. But that's cheap psychology, and I do not want speculation like that to take away from the novel.

It took me a little bit to get into this book-- something about the beginning made me resist the text. If you have a similar experience, don't give up. I cannot figure out now what caused the resistance (something to do with the sinking feeling that this book was going to be really really really dry), but it was quickly over and I was engrossed for the rest of the reading experience.

What made the book so wonderful for me was the way that Holtby took out the gothic story elements and dusted them off, adding a brisk dose of emotional and procedural reality. The book has the brooding landowner with a half-neglected child and mad wife. It has the harum-scarum schoolteacher who takes the child under her wing. There is a love affair, but Jane Eyre this isn't. This isn't the sweep of romance, but something more about the inevitability of life. Holtby's characters have to struggle to keep their dignity. Some of them fail. Some of them put too high of a price on their independence. Some never have a chance from the start. Sarah is an absolutely wonderful character (the characters in general are the strongest part of the book) and the fact that she manages to keep her head up never implies that she has been left unscathed.

Rigorous, well-written, and beautifully developed. Highly recommended.

Pre-war Yorkshire tale
I bought this as an 80th birthday present for my Yorkshire mother. She is thoroughly enjoying it, saying that it is so true to how life was lived before the Welfare State. Winifred Holtby - whose own story was told in Vera Brittain's Testament of Friendship - cleverly used the framework of council meetings and concerns to show just how such decisions touched the lives of ordinary men and women in the 1930s.
Definitely worth a read, if only make you thankful you live in more enlightened and socially protected times.