Reviews

• This is an outstanding book, a masterpiece. It reveals a facinating world of the 1930s, of local government, and of rural England and its social structure. It is rightly called "An English Landscape" rather than a Yorkshire one, because although it is about east Yorkshire, it does not draw on specifically "northern" stereotypes. Although a Yorkshirewoman through and through (Holtby is an East Riding name), the author does not use that as her theme. The characters in the novel are exceptionally well-drawn: the worthy but none-too-bright Carne; the other County Councillors; the ostensible lead character, Sarah Burton; and the real lead character, Alderman Mrs Beddows, who, if anyone, comes across as the hero of the book. You get the impression that Winifred Holtby, herself of prosperous farming stock (like Carne, but not like Miss Burton or Mrs Beddows) really knows the part of the world she describes. It is very different to present day rural England: there are few incomers, no weekenders or long-distance commuters, and few retirees, although one, Stanley Dollan, a retired solicitor from Kingsport (Hull) who defeats Carne in a County Council election, is in fact an example of this new breed. In some ways the book is a harrowing one, dealing with poverty, emotion and "decline and fall", but it is not depressing; it contains hope and not a little humour as well. I have no hesitation in giving this book five stars, but there is one caveat. That is not to do with the novel, but with the production (BBC Books, 2011). It has a poorly written and slightly inaccurate "Note on the Author" and has far too many printing errors, owing, I imagine, to hurried production. But they do not spoil the enjoyment of reading it.

• Courtesy of the BBC iPlayer, I got around to watching a BBC three parter based on a novel which I found captivating in parts and deeply frustrating in others. Seeing as it was an adaption of a novel by Andrew Davies (i.e. Davies was the adaptor, not the novelist), I wondered whether the frustrating parts might be Davies' fault rather than the source materials, especially since I googled the original novelist, Winifred Holtby, and she sounded fascinating (feminist, socialist, daughter of the first female alderman in Yorkshire, wrote the first academic treatise on Virginia Woolf in Britain, died young, unfortunately, in 1935). So I read the novel itself: South Riding. Which indeed proved many, though not all, of the problems I had were due to Davies' alterations, and in any event was a treat to read. It greatly appealed to the ensemble girl in me; inevitably, and this isn't something I blame Davies for, the tv version was more streamlined and focused on far fewer characters whereas the novel is more of a community story, but when I speak of the ensemble quality, I mean more than that. All the characters come across as three dimensional, and there are no caricatures around. There is a very humane quality to Winifred Holtby's writing: characters who in another novel might have served as boo-hiss villains for failing to live up to their claims of virtue, like the Reverend Huggins who cheats on his wife and becomes embroiled in a land scheme, instead are written with sympathy and allowed their strengths as well as weaknesses (Huggins is sincerely appalled by poverty and injustice and fights against it). Her novel, set in provincial Yorkshire in the early 30s, is also in many ways the anti Brideshead Revisited or the anti Downton Abbey, if you like. There is no nostalgia for the pre-WWI past there, most of the characters are middle class or working class, and the one main character who symbolizes the fading gentry, unable to cope with the present, let alone the future, doesn't have a "golden, idyllic past" since he's simultanously an update of Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre fame, and a fascinatingly both similar and very different one from the simultanously written and more well known update, Maxim de Winter in Rebecca. The character who comes closest to a leading role, radical headmistresss Sarah Burton, suffers the most in the last third of the tv version because Davies as opposed to Holtby in the novel inevitably privileges Sarah-the-lover over Sarah-the-headmistresss and fataly changes some of her background and motivations. Let's start with the background. In the novel, Sarah before coming to South Riding had three major romantic relationships; one when she was very young in the war with the inevitable tragic ending when he died, one when she was a teacher in South Africa which ended for political reasons (she also left South Africa because of apartheid, and remember, this novel was finished in 1935), and one with a Labour mp who wanted her to give up her job and marry him and was shocked when she said she'd rather be his mistress instead. In the tv version, Sarah still had her wartime romance but never loved another man since (though as she informs another character "there were other men - none of them meant anything!"). The character she informs is Joe, the sole socialist on the South Riding council; in the novel, Sarah meets him through a spirited political debate. In the tv version, she meets him because she runs out crying out of a performance when a war related patriotic song is sung whereupon she proceeds to tell this total stranger all about her dead wartime lover. In the novel, the two stay friends throughout, even when Joe is leaving South Riding. In the tv version, he gives her a "love me or I'll leave this dump!" ultimatum in part three. He leaves, because Sarah's main storyline in the tv version, which is only one storyline of hers in the novel, is her not quite romance with Robert Carne. When this started I thought "it is a rule universally acknowledged that a brooding Yorkshire squire in possession of a mad wife must be in want of a sensible schoolteacher" and groaned. But if Carne is in some ways a modern Rochester (and in the novel as opposed to the tv version, this is even lampshaded because of course Sarah has read Jane Eyre and the comparison occurs to her), the relationship goes another way. Carne and his reactionary politics never stop symbolizing everything Sarah is against, and she's not economially dependent on him; on the contrary, he's the one in increasing financial distress due to the depression and his inability to cope with modern times. This being the 20th century, his wife isn't hidden in the attic but in a sanatorium (which puts a further financial strain on Carne's purse but my sympathies re: this vanished when the novel told me he was just too proud to let his wife's father pay for it) and the fact he's married isn't a secret, either. As opposed to Rochester and Maxim de Winter, he on the one hand not only married for love but is still in love with the mad wife in question, but on the other also bears and acknowledges guilt direct responsibility for her state of being. (This, btw, is something problematic in both novel and tv version and not Davies' fault, because the fact Carne forced himself on his wife on one occasion when she didn't want sex, resulting in an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy she was explicitly warned against that pushed the already neurotic woman over the edge post birth, is treated at his tragedy, not hers.) Where the novel and the tv version fatally part ways is in the aftermath of Sarah's and Carne's one and only night together. In both cases, said night takes place in a hotel and before it gets to anything sexual, he has a breakdown due to being sick with the result that they don't have sex but she nurses him through the night and they part being mutually highly embarrassed for different reasons. In the novel, the next time they meet Sarah doesn't bring it up but the anger and embarrassment fuel her confrontational mood, with the result they have a full on fight about their usual issues, part in mutual anger, and since he then immediately has his fatal accident that makes everyone believe he committed suicide for a while, she feels awful and guilty, thinks about resigning and is talked out of it by Mrs Beddowes (the female alderman modelled after Holtby's mother). This conversation takes place in Sarah's office. In the tv version, Sarah and Robert Carne do talk about their night together, they part on loving terms, Sarah declares her love at his graveside in public, then resigns, then actually gets into the train and his talked out of it with Mrs. Beddows literally stopping the train to prevent her from going. It's melodrama versus character drama, and Sarah actually leaving (as opposed to thinking about it because she's depressed and feels guilty in the aftermath of the muddle of that last argument and Carne's death) and only forcibly prevented from it makes her look awful, too, me, because her main commitment in the story (in both versions, though in the novel this is far stronger because as I said we see far more of Sarah being a headmistress) is to her pupils whom she would fail by leaving. One main story that is well done in novel and tv version alike is the one of Sarah's student Lydia Holly, a working class girl with a scholarship who after her mother dies has to care for all her younger siblings and thus loses her chance at life for a while. Lydia with her passion and her anger is a very convincing teenager and the hopelessness of her situation is extremely claustrophobic, so when a resolution does present eventually itself it's a blinding relief. Holtby is generally good at writing teenagers without either prettifying or demonizing them; one plot th important in the novel than in the tv version is what happens with one of the teachers, who is unable to keep discipline or any kind of authority among her students (and is simply bad her job in this sense, though she's well educated and also depends on the income completely as do her elderly parents, and, being in her mid-40s, is unlikely to get another school position if she's dismissed, which is one of Sarah's main dilemmas in the book) and ends up being bullied by the girls into hitting Carne's daughter (in the secureness of her privilege the main bully), which forces the woman to resign. The increasing taunting and bullying of the teenage girls feels chillingly familiar and yet their pov is given a well; they simply are unable to see a teacher as another human being, she's a ridiculous authority figure, and it wouldn't even occur to them that what they're doing is persecution. She's an adult and therefore an alien. Mrs. Beddowes the Alderman in both book and tv version is a great and rare example of a female character in her early 70s who doesn't fulfill a "mother" (or "grandmother") role in the story; she's one of the main politicians of South Riding, champions Sarah as a headmistress but has a more cool personal relationship with her whereas she opposes Robert Carne politically but shares a long term friendship with him. (The nature of this friendship is different in tv version and novel, though. Because Mrs. Beddowes is a pov character, it's clear in the book that she loves Carne, though because of the age difference and the fact she's married she would never do something non-platonic. In the tv version, you can see her attitude as strictly friendly. When in the novel Mrs. Beddows in her conversation with Sarah after Carne's death talks about how being 70 doesn't make a difference, there are still days you feel like a girl and then you go down the stairs and look in the mirror and the wrinkled face of a stranger looks back, and so she didn't have an option but friendship, in the tv version Davies tones this down to "I loved him, too, and maybe more than I should have" and that's it. I must admit that Carne being played by David Morrissey helps somewhat to explain why both Sarah and Mrs. Beddowes are attracted to him, because they also agree on the fact he's a hopeless reactionary and none too smart (though honorable and straightfoward; no land buying and selling speculations for Robert Carne, but then again, that's one of the reasons why he goes broke). It occurs to me that I've made the novel and the tv series sound unrelentingly grim, which it's not; there is a lot of humour in it as well - Holtby gets her satiric pen out for many of the council meetings (so much so that her mother felt obliged to resign as an Alderman after the novel got published), and Sarah's drive to install passion in her girls is appealing if you have any soft spot for inspiring teacher stories at all. Lastly: the novel was finished in the year of Holtby's death, 1935, and there is a passage in which Sarah worries what became of a German teacher she used to know who when last heard of was brought to Dachau. (Just in case you need a reference to how aware the British public at that point could be of what the Third Reich was doing to its opponents, years before the Wannsee conference took ever place and a year before the world-attended Olympics happened in Berlin.) By contrast, Davies, presumably to present Joe as a clueless socialist, gives him a speech to his fellow councilmen of how they should pay attention to the social programs abroad "like Chancellor Hitler's in Germany", which isn't in the novel at all. In fairness, he also lets Joe mention Roosevelt's New Deal program, but still, the difference is annoying.

• A gem of thirties lit.

• Well written, profound yet entertaining ~ a rare combination! It resonates particularly with those who may, like me, have been brought up by that generation of Northerners depicted here. Excellent reading. Lot of typos, but nothing we can't get over 🙂

• South Riding est un roman qui, bien que se déclinant en plusieurs intrigues secondaires, n'a cependant qu'un thème central: la vie d'un village anglais (et ses alentours) après la première Guerre Mondiale. Nous suivons la vie de plusieurs personnages, chacun avec ses qualités, ses défauts, ses joies, ses drames... Bref, des hommes et des femmes ordinaires - et c'est pourquoi le roman parvient à émouvoir le lecteur. De grands thèmes traversent le livre: la politique, l'éducation, tradition contre progrès, etc... Au final, un livre riche, offrant tout le panorama d'une époque au coeur d'un village (fictif, certes) du Yorkshire. Une excellente lecture.

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