South Riding

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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. I’ve not read Holtby yet but I feel I’ve read a lot about her – I’m glad she is getting more attention. While the novel undoubtedly remains a fascinating depiction of a time and place, it is more than that.

She wished to prepare their minds, to train their bodies, and to inoculate their spirit with some of her own courage, optimism and unstaled delight. As you read you will stumble upon beautiful phrases such as "slapped the kettle on the stove" and "fastened it at the throat with a cameo brooch" strewn over a slow narrative. Beddows: as the South Riding's first female alderman, she's expected to be colorful and allows people to believe outlandish stories about her, but in reality she's more conventional than that, a worldly-wise grandmother who finds happiness through community involvement--and through the attention of Robert Carne, whom she views as a combination of attractive male friend and spiritual son-in-law.

On one level, it is an ensemble piece structured around the workings of local government, their impact on the district of South Riding and the people who live there. Central to Holtby’s story is Sarah Burton, a forty-year-old unmarried woman, newly appointed to the role of headmistress at the local girls’ school. In time, however, Mrs Beddows recognises her feeling towards Carne are more akin to that of a mother for her son-in-law, particularly once she assumes the role of surrogate grandmother to Midge. Optimism and the will to optimism are different things, and Miss Holtby’s gallant effort to infer from her heroine’s change of heart a more hopeful future for society at large does not ring quite true as I have had the misfortune to read for a very long time.

This book is infatuated with the romance of the Lord of the Manor - but at the same time it is trying to reconcile that particular fantasy with very worthy ideals like feminism, quality education for women, alleviation of poverty, trying to provide proper health care and housing for very vulnerable people and hoping there won’t be another war. 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. There is a very humane quality to Winifred Holtby's writing: characters who in another novel might have served as boo-hiss villains for failing to live up to their claims of virtue, like the Reverend Huggins who cheats on his wife and becomes embroiled in a land scheme, instead are written with sympathy and allowed their strengths as well as weaknesses (Huggins is sincerely appalled by poverty and injustice and fights against it).In truth, Sarah Burton would like to replace Miss Sigglesthwaite with a better role model for her pupils; her only hope is that the Sig will resign, freeing up the position for a more dynamic teacher to join the staff. This is the story of a multitude of characters, flawed and imperfect as may be' yet with an undeniable charm.

Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby had lived together in London after graduation and remained very close friends throughout Holtby's lifetime. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

While the project offers opportunities for development – improvements to transport, new housing, more jobs – the scheme is also open to abuse, particularly by the likes of Alderman Snaith, a slippery man who preys on the vulnerabilities of others. In the tv version, Sarah still had her wartime romance but never loved another man since (though as she informs another character "there were other men - none of them meant anything! Au final, un livre riche, offrant tout le panorama d'une époque au coeur d'un village (fictif, certes) du Yorkshire. There is no nostalgia for the pre-WWI past there, most of the characters are middle class or working class, and the one main character who symbolizes the fading gentry, unable to cope with the present, let alone the future, doesn't have a "golden, idyllic past" since he's simultanously an update of Mr. And yet it’s also very readable – the sort of classic you can sink into and enjoy as the characters’ lives unfold.