Winifred Holtby's most famous novel, South Riding (1936), has just been reissued to tie in with the forthcoming Andrew Davies adaptation for the BBC. Born and brought up in East Yorkshire, I'm anxious to know if Andrew Davies can adequately represent the barren yet beautiful Humber Estuary and the rich farmland that Winifred Holtby describes so well.
Yet the fact that the BBC has chosen to adapt South Riding suggests that the appeal of this absorbing and ambitious novel is not merely local interest. In a press release, Andrew Davies portrays South Riding as recession literature, drawing the obvious comparison between post First World War England, struggling with the effects of the Great Depression, and our own unstable economic times. There is another parallel that can be drawn. At the centre is an unstable coalition between a conservative and a liberal in the shape of a doomed love affair between gentleman farmer Robert Carne, and Sarah Burton, who believes passionately in reform and women’s rights but is drawn despite herself to the reactionary, arrogant, yet charming Carne – the embodiment of everything she is fighting against. Sound familiar?
Written whilst Holtby was dying, South Riding is the swan song of this indomitable Oxbridge graduate. Comparable to George Eliot’s Middlemarch in its panoramic portrayal of English society, Holtby’s characters, like Eliot’s, are realistic, three-dimensional, and encompass many aspects of human experience.
At the novel's heart are the main pillar of provincial life: the High School, where Sarah is Headmistress, and the city council. Yet local government in South Riding is not tedious, impersonal bureaucracy, but a living, thriving institution that effects the lives of all of the novel's characters. It is this kind of all-inclusive local government that Cameron's plans to devolve power from the centre to local communities aim to recreate.
South Riding portrays failure: Carne's failure to ride out the agricultural recession, due in part to the money he spends to pay off the debt he feels he owes to his past, the failure of love, the failure of peace. Yet there is also success, shown in the story of Lydia Holly, a young girl whose family camps in a railway carriage and whose passion for education saves her from poverty and deprivation.
South Riding portrays failure: Carne's failure to ride out the agricultural recession, due in part to the money he spends to pay off the debt he feels he owes to his past, the failure of love, the failure of peace. Yet there is also success, shown in the story of Lydia Holly, a young girl whose family camps in a railway carriage and whose passion for education saves her from poverty and deprivation.
Although the England that South Riding portrays has changed beyond all recognition, this moving, powerful novel is a compelling reminder of what once was – a reminder of our advances in health care and women’s rights, and of the sense of community that we have lost.
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