Winifred Holtby: Chronicler of the South Riding

125 years old today!

It may seem to you that in my pattern I have laid greater emphasis upon human affliction than you might consider typical or necessary. But when I came to consider local government, I began to see how it was in essence the first-line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies - poverty, sickness, ignorance, isolation, mental derangement and social maladjustment. The battle is not faultlessly conducted, nor are the motives of those who take part in it all righteous or disinterested. But the war is, I believe, worth fighting …we are not only single individuals, each face to face with eternity and our separate spirits; we are members one of another.

Winifred Holtby, who was born this day in 1898, wrote these words in a Preface to her last and greatest novel, South Riding, a preface which took the form of a letter to her mother. Alderman Mrs Holtby might have felt that she was compromised by the characters and incidents described in this book, based largely on local government shenanigans and, despite Winifred’s protestations, it is hard not to feel that Alderman Mrs Beddows, one of the most sympathetic characters in the novel, was based upon Winifred’s own mother, Alice.

Anna Maxwell Martin plays Sarah Burton in the 2011 BBC adaptation of South Riding. Photo courtesy of the BBC

South Riding is one of those novels I can go back to time and again and each time get more from it. I probably first read it as a young woman, and was swept away by the romance of headmistress Sarah Burton’s passion for Robert Carne. This tragic doomed Yorkshire farmer - struggling to save his estate which is mortgaged to the hilt at a time of agricultural depression; to finance the care of his beloved wife, condemned to live out her days in a mental asylum; and to protect his only child, the nervous and imperfect Midge - is Mr Rochester brought up to date, and was perfectly played by David Morrissey in the BBC version.

David Morrissey as Robert Carne, photo courtesy of the BBC

Now when I return to it, in an age when austerity and political corruption once again seem to be destroying the fabric of local communities, when rivers run with sewage, when there are not enough houses that young agricultural workers can afford, and when farmers face financial ruin across the country, I wonder what Holtby would have made of it all. She was writing in 1936, when England was still in the grips of the Depression, and the book is by no means optimistic about the future, death stalks its pages, but she did believe in the power of the local community to look after its own, which she had inherited from her mother. The local authority described in South Riding may not be perfect, but it seems to have the power to rebuild a school, to invest in social housing and roads, to set its own priorities and to get things done at speed.

Winifred Holtby was the daughter of a Yorkshire farmer, and might have spent her life in the wolds near Bridlington, but in fact she packed a bundle of adventures into a short life. From Queen Margaret’s School in Scarborough she won a place to Somerville College, Oxford in 1917, but instead enrolled in the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps and served in France. On her return to England she took up her place at Oxford where she formed a lifelong friendship with Vera Brittain, of Testament of Youth fame. The two girls moved to London, shared digs and launched upon careers in writing and journalism, with Winifred’s first novel, Anderby Wold, published in 1923, when she was twenty-five.

Both women were strongly political, campaigners for the newly formed League of Nations, travelling all over Europe. Winifred also wrote for the Manchester Guardian and for Time and Tide, a left wing feminist magazine founded in 1920 by Lady Rhondda, of which she became a Director. In all she wrote six novels and several collections of short stories. She campaigned for the rights of black trade unionists in South Africa, at home she campaigned for women’s rights and for more equal sharing of domestic duties.

The Winifred Holtby Academy in Hull has ‘Respect, Ambition, Achievement’ as its school motto. I’m not sure that Miss Sarah Burton of the South Riding would have put ‘Respect’ first on the list - her challenge to her girls was to question everything, especially those in authority:

Don’t let me catch you at any time loving anything without asking questions. Question everything, even what I am saying now, especially, perhaps, what I say. Question every one in authority, and see that you get sensible answers to your questions…question your Government’s policy, question the arms race, question the Kingsport slums, and the economics over feeding schoolchildren and the rule that makes women have to renounce their jobs on marriage and why the derelict areas are still derelict.

South Riding was written in a desperate race against time: the thirty-seven year old Winifred was dying of kidney disease, and took herself off to a boarding house on the coast at Withernsea where she scribbled frantically. She did not live to see it published, her friend Vera Brittain saw it through the press, but it is still hailed today as a classic.

Anderby Wold, Holtby’s first novel, is also set in the Yorkshire countryside that Winifred loved and which fed her soul. It too ends with a woman left alone, dealing with fire, disaster, death and the end of love. But it ends on a perfectly beautiful note:

She moved suddenly and flung back the curtains. Outside, the rain had ceased and it was light again. The pungent smell of rain-washed earth came in from the autumn garden, and with it another smell of charred wood and blackened straw. From the church on the hill a bell was ringing for seven o‘clock service. Golden beyond the sodden shrubbery the sunrose slowly over Anderby Wold.

On the 125th anniversary of her birth, I encourage you all to pick up a Winifred Holtby novel, so perfectly English, so beautifully written, so honest about life, but still holding out a hope for the future.