Customer Reviews

South Riding: An English Landscape (Virago Modern Classics)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

On the surface, this novel is the story of local government in a Yorkshire town during the years 1932 to 1934. The novel opens with a deadly dull City Council, but it expands into something much, much more. The focus of the novel is on Sarah Burton a forty-ish spinster and the headmistress of the local Girls' School; but it often makes forays into the lives and thoughts of the other townspeople.

At first, from the description (and from reading the prologue) I thought I wasn't going to care much for this book. Plus, there's a veery long list of characters at the beginning which initially made me think I was going to get everyone confused. But the story really started to pick up as Sarah began to become involved with the town, especially Robert Carne, a landowner with a teenage daughter in Sarah's school and an ill wife. Certainly, Jane Eyre influenced this book (and there are shades of Rebecca, although that book was published slightly later), but there are also a number of differences. The romance between Sarah and Carne is a bit predictable; and yet, it's a lot more complicated than you expect, too. As a result, I was surprised by the way that the story turned up; not everything is wrapped and tied up in a neat little package.

The gubernatorial stuff gets a bit tedious (Holtby's mother was an alderman, and she shows off her knowledge in this novel), but I did enjoy reading about these characters and what happens to them. Holtby really knew how to get at the heart of her characters' emotions.

I was inspired to read this book when I saw a preview for the Masterpiece Theater production that will be on this spring in the US. I have heard other readers talk about Holtby and how good her books are so I was excited to pick up a copy of what is considered to be her masterpiece, South Riding. The story behind this book involves the lives of the men and women of a small Yorkshire community rich, poor and middle in between the World Wars. Times are beginning to change but for the most part the men and women of this community still have hopes, passions and dreams and this book is about them. I think I was expecting the book to be mostly about Sarah Burton, the new 40 year old head school mistress of Kiplington High School and her relationship with Robert Carne of Maythrope Hall, a farmer who has had hard times. I soon realized that this book is about much more than this one relationship as it involves a whole cast of rich and lively characters. Once I got used to the way the book was written and the initial shock of it being much different than I thought I began to enjoy this book. I think the only way to describe it is Jane Eyre meets Shirley both by Charlotte Bronte, South Riding has mock gothic influences but it is about the social and political changes going on in this community during the very difficult recovery point after WWI leading to the WWII. The only problem I had with this book was that I thought it had too many characters and it was hard to give each of the characters their proper development in order to feel satisfied with what was happening. Also, in some places the transitions from character to character are hard to follow but for the most part things flow smoothly. The best part of this book is that it is a realistic portrayal of the time period and it really makes readers feel as if they are a part of the changing world and gives us and idea about what the time period was really like.

The book was in okay condition, not great as advertised, and it shipped from the UK, not from Florida as advertised (this is not really a problem, but it took a lot longer than one would have thought). South Riding is a fascinating 1930's British feminist kind of perspective on the British class system at the time, the clash between industrialists and the older landowning farmer class, and the rising middle class. A very interesting read, if you're into all things English.