"... a rich, panoramic novel, bringing vividly to life a rural community on the brink of change." Indeed it is, but what the cover copy did not lead me to expect was quite what a roiling mix of passion and principle drives Winifred Holtby's 1930s novel South Riding.
From the almost gothic romance between Robert Carne and Sarah Burton - he the brooding, reactionary squire, she the spirited, modern headmistress - to the social commentary and proselytizing on issues of welfare, rights and mores, the book is part Victorian melodrama or Bronte-esque 'Penny Dreadful' almost, part fictionalised political tract. It's a curious combination, with untempered passages which take it over the edge of the sentimental, to other parts which amount to a measured hymn of praise for humanity. As a portrait of an area and a period it is quite compelling, and it's a book for which many readers will have much affection, I'm sure.
I enjoyed it thoroughly, its socially conscious social conscience, its picture of encroaching 'progress', and the end of the old ways, its Mr. Rochester hero, the generous, indefatigable, loving Mrs. Beddows, always compensating for others' failings, the emancipated, idealistic Miss Burton who is all too human; there's so much there - too much, perhaps. Some plotlines have impossibly sudden, neat solutions, viz. the Hollys and the problem of Lydia's education, while elsewhere ... well, I'd have wished for another outcome for Carne. As for the odious Snaith and Huggins, do they not make your flesh creep in their different ways?!
There were some great lines such as the condemnation of Carne's modernist sister-in-law: "All fish and finger-bowls and no common sense", Mrs. Huggins " 'washing out a few things' when she needed them, thus preserving her amateur status, as it were, in domestic labour...", Mr. Drew who "did business in a small way, but [...] moral censorship in quite a large one" (and he does literary criticism as well - see p. 270); but all in all it's a great story and an absorbing read. What did you think of it?
PS. Here's what to eat with South Riding.