For me that's a plus; literature should deal with big ideas, and the structure of society and purpose of government are certainly that. I mean the fact that Robert Carne is considered a good-looking man and constantly likened to Mussolini. When Brittain and Catlin set up home in London after their marriage, Holtby joined them as the third member of the household. The rights to the book were given to Somerville College, Oxford by Holtby on her death, which used royalties from South Riding and Pavements at Anderby to fund a scholarship. There's a lot going on in this book, and Holtby has a clean style that keeps the story moving and focused on the most interesting moments in the characters' lives.

But Holtby understood the necessity of conveying progressive ideas to the widest possible readership, of the kind that Woolf scorned in her essay "The Middlebrow". In the publicity for its new three-part adaptation of South Riding, the BBC announced that it was rescuing "a little-known novel" from oblivion, a sentiment echoed by the master of period adaptations, Andrew Davies, who claimed to have rediscovered "a forgotten masterpiece". It was her business to equip the young women entrusted to her by a still inadequately enlightened State for their part in that achievement. As you say, it’s a tragedy that this author died at such a young age, at the height of her powers with South Riding. Through South Riding, Holtby went a long way towards achieving "the shining immortality" that Brittain had wanted for her.

Description: The community of South Riding, like the rest of the country, lives in the long shadow of war. Beddows; the gentleman farmer, Robert Carne, and his troubled daughter, Midge; the bright but impoverished teenager, Lydia Holly; the hedonistic but devout preacher, Councillor Huggins. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. It's an ensemble piece, structured around the activities of local government and the ways they intersect with the characters' lives.

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 many ways, it feels as if she was working up to this novel by mapping out some of the groundwork in her debut, Anderby Wold.Williams still possesses the copy of South Riding that her mother Vera Brittain inscribed for her father, the political scientist George Catlin. Carne had no social conscience beyond the desire to maintain the station his family had kept for five hundred years. Miss Holtby has used her imagination not to create a world but to bring vividly before our eyes a world already in being.