Winifred Holtby

When Sarah Burton returns to her hometown as headmistress she is full of ambition, determined to create a great school and to inspire her girls to take all they can from life. But in the aftermath of the First World War, the country is in depression and ideals are hard won. Lydia Holly, the scholarship girl from the shacks, is the most brilliant student Sarah has ever taught, but when her mother's health fails, her education must be sacrificed - there is nobody else to care for the children. Robert Carne of Maythorpe Hall stands for everything Sarah despises: his family has farmed the South Riding for generations, their position uncontested. Yet Sarah cannot help being drawn to this proud, haunted - and almost ruined - man. South Riding is a rich, panoramic novel, bringing vividly to life a rural community on the brink of change.

An English Landscape

South Riding

Features a story about the need to withstand the tyranny of sex success.

The Crowded Street

Anderby Wold

Mandoa is a small African state. At its head a virgin princess conceives (immaculately) further princesses. The old traditions are undisturbed until the Lord High Chamberlain visits Addis and discovers baths and cocktail shakers, motor cars and telephones. This is 1931.

A Comedy of Irrelevance

Mandoa, Mandoa!

Poor Caroline

Joanna Burton was born in South Africa but sent by her missionary father to be raised in Yorkshire. There she dreams of the far-off lands she will visit and adventures to come. At eighteen, tall and flaxen-haired, she meets Teddy Leigh, a young man on his way to the trenches of the First World War. Joanna has been in love before - with Sir Walter Raleigh, with the Scarlet Pimpernel, with Coriolanus - but this is different. Teddy tells her he's been given the world to wear as a golden ball. Joanna believes him and marries him, but the fabled shores recede into the distance when, after the war, Teddy returns in ill health. The magic land turns out to be the harsh reality of motherhood and life on a Yorkshire farm. Yet still she dares to dream.

A Virago Modern Classic

The Land Of Green Ginger

Paul Berry

Marion Shaw

This selection of Winifred Holtby's short stories is drawn from her two published volumes, TRUTH IS NOT SOBER and PAVEMENTS OF ANDERBY, which were published posthumously by her two friends, Vera Brittain and Hilda Reid and have been collected here in one volume for the first time. Brightly written, in an unselfconscious, matter-of-fact style, these stories are irreverent and entertaining, fulfilling what she saw as the short story's purpose in a reader's life: 'nice for chance guests - easy to pick up and more tantalising for one's bedside than a novel'. Many of these stories are autobiographically based, and feature the Yorkshire farming community in Rudston where she was brought up. This was the setting for her most famous novel, SOUTH RIDING, also published posthumously. Some of the stories relate to the last years of her life when she was contending with the incessant headaches and nausea of Bright's disease.

The Selected Stories of Winifred Holtby

Remember, Remember!

memoria crítica

Virginia Woolf

Letters to a Friend

Mary Robson is a young Yorkshire woman, married to her solid, unromantic cousin, John. Together they battle to preserve Mary's neglected inheritance, her beloved farm, Anderby Wold. This labour of love - and the benevolent tyranny of traditional Yorkshire ways - have made Mary old before her time. Then into her purposeful life comes David Rossitur, red-haired, charming, eloquent: how can she help but love him? But David is a young man from a different England, radical and committed to social change. As their confrontation and its consequences inevitably unfold, Mary's life and that of the calm village of Anderby are changed forever.

This is the story of Muriel Hammond, at twenty living within the suffocating confines of Edwardian middle-class society in Marshington, a Yorkshire village. A career is forbidden to her. Pretty, but not pretty enough, she fails to achieve the one thing required of her - to find a suitable husband. Then comes the First World War, a watershed which tragically revolutionises the lives of her generation. But for Muriel it offers work, friendship, freedom, and one last chance to find a special kind of happiness...

“South Riding” is a 1936 novel by Winifred Holtby, published posthumously. Set in fictional South Riding in Yorkshire, England, it revolves around the lives of young headmistress Sarah Burton, unhappy husband Robert Carne of Maythorpe Hall, socialist Joe Astell, and Alderman Mrs Beddows. Winifred Holtby (1898 – 1935) was an English novelist and journalist, best known for her novel South Riding. She was, an passionate feminist, socialist and pacifist and was a member of the feminist Six Point Group. Holtby's fame was derived mainly from her journalism, including articles for the feminist journal 'Time and Tide', but she also wrote 14 books. These include six novels; two volumes of short stories; the first critical study of Virginia Woolf (1932) and "Women and a Changing Civilization" (1934), a feminist survey with opinions that are still relevant. This classic work is being republished now in a new edition with specially curated introductory material.

Winifred Holtby

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