Adams, Pauline (1996). Somerville for Women: An Oxford College, 1879-1993. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199201822. The series won both the BAFTA and the Broadcasting Press Guild awards for Best Drama Series in 1975. [6] [7] Sarah Waters, a well-respected UK author, who said, ‘I can’t say enough good things about this book.’ The first episode aired on BBC One 20 February 2011, the two remaining on the following Sundays. In the United States, it aired on the PBS anthology series Masterpiece in May 2011. [1] Cast [ edit ]

South Riding by Winifred Holtby | Goodreads

BBC version: filming the railway sequences - also includes links to video interviews with cast and crew, and details locations used Vera Brittain wrote about her friendship with Holtby in her book Testament of Friendship (1940) and in 1960 published a censored edition of their correspondence. [16] Their letters, along with many of Holtby's other papers, were donated in 1960 to Hull Central Library in Yorkshire and are now held at the Hull History Centre. Other papers are in Bridlington library in Yorkshire, in McMaster University Library in Canada and in the University of Cape Town library in South Africa. A biography of Holtby by Marion Shaw, The Clear Stream, was published in 1999 and draws on a broad range of sources.They didn’t meet as students so much as collide, Holtby having crashed into the study where they were both to have a tutorial – and Brittain did not care for her at first. But then, she’d long struggled to make college friendships, isolated by her age and war-worldliness. She had first gone up to Oxford in 1914, but left the following year to serve as a nurse, work that would bring her to see some of the worst injuries imaginable; her sweetheart, Roland Leighton, and her brother, Edward, were both killed in the war. Holtby, five years her junior, had also interrupted her degree to nurse, but she had served only on the war’s “fringes”, an experience she enjoyed; she suffered, moreover, no tragic personal losses. Holtby was buried in All Saints' churchyard in Rudston, East Yorkshire, just yards from the house in which she was born. Her epitaph is "God give me work till my life shall end and life till my work is done". [17] Personally, I am a feminist … because I dislike everything that feminism implies. … I want to be about the work in which my real interests lie … But while … injustice is done and opportunity denied to the great majority of women, I shall have to be a feminist. [4] a b Rustin, Susanna (14 January 2017). "Winifred Holtby: author, feminist, campaigner". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 17 January 2017.

South Riding (Virago Modern Classics): Holtby, Winifred South Riding (Virago Modern Classics): Holtby, Winifred

We're so busy resigning ourselves to the inevitable that we don't even ask if it is inevitable. We've got to have courage, to take our future into our hands. If the law is oppressive, we must change the law. If tradition is obstructive, we must break tradition. If the system is unjust, we must reform the system.” Although she never returned to Yorkshire to live, Holtby’s flourishing writing career explored the impact of the inter-war period on its rural and agricultural society. I found these letters completely fascinating. They contain no juicy literary gossip, and most are not especially well written. But the relationship at their centre is endlessly intriguing, and when these young women outline their burgeoning ideas about their careers, marriage, happiness and freedom, it’s touching and inspiring. Neither one is afraid of ambition. Can a man ever offer the same understanding to a woman as a member of her own sex? On this, at least, the two of them are equally certain. The answer must be no. Such obliviousness. Such incuriosity. As Brittain writes of her (mostly) kind and stimulating husband: “He never says: ‘Tell me some more!’”

Holtby began to suffer from high blood pressure, recurrent headaches and bouts of lassitude, and in 1931 she was diagnosed as suffering from Bright's disease. Her doctor gave her only two years to live. Aware of her impending death, Holtby put all her remaining energy into what became her most important book, South Riding. Winifred Holtby died on 29 September 1935, aged 37. She never married, though Harry Pearson proposed to her on her deathbed, possibly at the instigation of Vera Brittain. [3] Writings [ edit ] In 1919, she returned to study at the University of Oxford where she met Vera Brittain, a fellow student and later the author of Testament of Youth, with whom she maintained a lifelong friendship. Other literary contemporaries at Somerville College included Hilda Reid, Margaret Kennedy and Sylvia Thompson. After graduating from Oxford, in 1921, Winifred and Vera moved to London, hoping to establish themselves as writers (the blue plaque at No. 82 Doughty Street refers). [2] At Oxford, Holtby met Vera Brittain, and it is through this friendship that she is probably best known. This is the story of a multitude of characters, flawed and imperfect as may be' yet with an undeniable charm. Be it Carne, a traditionalist who doesn't want to be pitied for his crumbling finances or Sarah Burton, the fiery headmistress who has modern reforms in mind yet hopelessly in love with her fiercest opponent, or Lydia Holly, who has to give up her education or Madame Hubbard who teaches young girls to dance ti ridiculous songs, every character will earn a place in your heart. I must add this is the first book I have read on local government and workings of the village council in the countryside, hence was refreshing and informative. Secondly, despite the large cast of characters. it is easier than you’d think to remember who is who. The author gives us events to hang up on each character. She also comes with a hint or a reminder occasionally. This is done unobtrusively. Moreover, the further one reads, the easier it becomes to immediately recognize who is speaking or being referred to. This is because each character begins to stand out as a unique individual with an identity all their own. Each has their own peculiarities. You simply can no longer mix them up!

Winifred Holtby and the Yorkshire Wolds The Story of Winifred Holtby and the Yorkshire Wolds

The novel was adapted for the cinema in 1938 starring Edna Best as Sarah Burton, Ralph Richardson as Robert Carne and Edmund Gwenn as Alfred Huggins. [4]Without emotion, without haste, without even, so far as Lovell could discern, any noticeable interest, the South Riding County Council ploughed through its agenda. The General mumbled; the clerk shuffled papers, the chairman of committees answered desultory questions” Si la construcción de personajes es uno de los mejores elementos del libro, el que lo ha hecho brillar más, para mí, ha sido la narración. Es un estilo simple y sin excesiva ornamentación, que en muchas ocasiones se limita a describir simplemente la rutina de los personajes, pero tiene párrafos, especialmente aquellos que se centran en el monólogo interno, que son para enmarcar. Párrafos que relees mil veces tanto por la belleza en que te lo está diciendo como por la verdad que encierra. Es impresionante cómo con las más simples palabras conjugadas se pueden crear frases tan harmoniosas y poéticas. The book I read from was Virago Modern Classic and of course that is a portent that it is a fine book. The Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize". The Royal Society of Literature. Archived from the original on 14 June 2011 . Retrieved 10 August 2010.

BBC One - South Riding BBC One - South Riding

If female friendship can be highly intense, it’s also deeply mysterious, its ineffability almost always better described in novels than in nonfiction. For this reason, perhaps, I hadn’t expected to find certain of its extremities quite so effectively mapped in a new collection of letters by Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, writers who are relatively little read today, and perhaps thought rather dusty by some (Brittain, celebrated for Testament of Youth, her memoir of the first world war, is the better known of the two, though her name has certainly faded since the late 1970s, when Virago reissued that book, and the BBC adapted it for television). But there it is. This deceptively gentle volume somehow gets to the heart of the matter, which has to do not only with need and approval, confidence and competition, but also with (sorry to bring this up) the patriarchy. Where else, in a world that is so often against her, is a woman supposed to find solidarity but with a sympathetic, like-minded sister? And yet, how this situation also sets us against one another. The book is set in the fictional South Riding of Yorkshire: the inspiration being the East Riding rather than South Yorkshire; Holtby's mother, Alice, was the first alderwoman on the East Riding County Council. [1] The leading characters are Sarah Burton, an idealistic young headmistress; Robert Carne of Maythorpe Hall, tormented by his disastrous marriage; Joe Astell, a socialist fighting poverty; and Mrs Beddows, the first woman alderman of the district.If you’d like to read more about Winifred Holtby, this blog is indebted to Marion Shaw’s The Clear Stream: A Life of Winifred Holtby and John Markham’s Guide to Winifred Holtby Country . Además hay que tener en cuenta que cuando un libro está narrado desde el punto de vista de diferentes personajes siempre habrá algunos que no te despierten demasiado interés y por lo tanto hagan la lectura más irregular. A mí esto me pasó con personajes como Huggins, que si bien tienen el mismo mérito que cualquier otro en su construcción, personalmente no me interesaba y prefería seguir explorando otros. A parte toda la trama política de las elecciones, aunque sé que es muy importante, también se me hacía algo cuesta arriba. Explora muy ricamente diversos temas y personajes, centrándose especialmente en los conflictos políticos y sociales, y por ello la considero una novela digna de estudio. Her literary criticism, too, is full of wonderful sentences. “Those who hold Dostoyevsky to be one of the world’s greatest novelists, a man of deep and tragic perception, a doctor of souls gifted with a sombre intensity of spiritual insight, must read with anguish these long, rambling, egotistic, and quite appallingly unpleasant letters,” she wrote of the Russian writer’s correspondence. In another review, for Good Housekeeping, of a book about ageing by an American psychiatrist, she sent herself up deliciously as “a spinster of 36 (with a hip measurement of 42 – I measured it this morning after reading an unusually apocalyptic and terrifying corset catalogue)”. She demolished Somerset Maugham’s view of marriage as an end in itself as 'flatly immoral' She worked in a nursing home with wounded soldiers returning from the front, before joining the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, with a post as a forewoman at a hostel on the frontline, near Abbeville, France.