South Riding

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Alongside the domestic concerns of the likes of Hollys, Holtby is also keen to delve into the workings of local government – both as a catalyst for social improvement and a vehicle for abuse and corruption. I love this book and very much enjoyed reading your thoughts on it, especially as it’s been quite some time since I read it. South Riding is a rich, panoramic novel, and Winifred Holtby brings vividly to life a rural community on the brink of change.

Blighted by recession and devastated by the loss, they must also come to terms with significant social change. She feared that her daughter's depiction of local government, allied to the vein of satire and "puckish mischief" familiar from her earlier books, might expose her own job to criticism and ridicule. Williams still possesses the copy of South Riding that her mother Vera Brittain inscribed for her father, the political scientist George Catlin. Brittain's epitaph 'Ave Atque Vale' and Elizabeth Ivemey's photographic portrait only featured in this limited, commemorative edition of South Riding, which mourned and celebrated a beloved friend and talented author: "Her radiant life had not reached its prime nor her vital worth its zenith.Photograph: Nicola Dove/BBC South Riding: Anna Maxwell Martin as Sarah Burton in the new BBC adaptation.

The novel's Cold Harbour Colony, the ex-servicemen's colony of smallholdings, is based on Sunk Island, the area of Holderness that rose from the waters of the Humber, while Robert Carne's decaying Maythorpe Hall was inspired by the White Hall in Winestead, which Holtby would have observed, shuttered and derelict, as a passenger on the Hull-Withernsea railway. She was active in the Independent Labour Party and was a staunch campaigner for the unionisation of black workers in South Africa, during which she had considerable contact with Leonard Woolf. On one level, it is an ensemble piece structured around the workings of local government, their impact on the district of South Riding and the people who live there. Meanwhile, the spectre of war seems to be everywhere – not only the fallout following WW1 but the threat of another conflict just hovering on the horizon.I had read reviews where it seems that great liberties had been taken with the plot, I didn't see it myself. Set in a fictional district of Yorkshire in the early 1930s, South Riding is an epic, life-affirming novel which explores issues of poverty, social mobility and the value of education. Inscribed by publisher to half title: "This edition of 175 copies has been printed for the author's friends with a personal introduction by Vera Brittain," foxed, 2cm closed tears to bottom margin of pp.