I love all things English; add in the English countryside in the interwar period and I’m sold. This book, written in the early 1930s and published in 1936, fits the bill and then some. The author, Winfred Holtby, a friend of Vera Brittain and a writer who travelled in the edges of the Bloomsbury circle of writers, was a prolific writer who died just before she turned 40, soon after the novel was completed. In my version of the story, there’s an afterward from the original publication written by Brittain.
Most of Holtby’s works were in the realm of traditional journalism, where her work was well-received. Holtby grew up in Yorkshire and clearly loved her home. The novel, set in an imaginary Yorkshire town in the midst of the Depression, has a strong and affectionate sense of place. At the center of the story is Sarah Burton, a 40-ish career woman who has returned home to Yorkshire to head a local girls school. Burton is a daughter of the working class made good, with politics that tend toward the socialist side of progressivism.
Though the story is centered on Burton, it’s full of the other figures in South Riding, especially the local town council aldermen (and one impressive alderwoman, likely modeled on Holtby’s mother), some of whom seek to do good works and others of whom seek to line their pockets. England of the 1930s is in transition and it’s not yet clear where this will take the nation.
The novel weaves a leisurely story of the poverty and prospects of the 1930s. It’s splendidly written, with powerful descriptions and an easy sympathy for the varied characters who make up the South Riding world. Much of the reflections of the narrator lend themselves to remembrances of WWI and the modern reader can’t help but think of a second war soon to come. Holtby references the political struggles in Europe but as fascism and Nazism have yet to play themselves out, that part of the story is incomplete, as it was in 1935 when the novel was finished.
There’s something haunting about a story set before a cataclysmic war that the reader knows is coming. The descriptions of 1930s economic class and social change echo in 2018 America in a way that felt timeless and, at times, less hopeful than I would have liked. Contemporary politics in this nation has me living with a sense of dread. But Holtby, a social reformer, saw shades of hope in the Yorkshire and England of her novel.
These days, I need that hope, however faint. I enjoyed this second reading of South Riding and when I set it back on my bookshelf it was with the sense that I would read it again in a few years. When that time comes, I know that Holtby's South Riding and Yorkshire will be the same. I’m hopeful that the United States will be in an all-together better place.
