I was about a quarter of the way through South Riding when I Googled Winifred Holtby (I’d not heard of her before picking up the novel). I was perturbed to discover that South Riding was published posthumously in 1936 and that Holtby wrote the novel aware that death awaited her, having been diagnosed with Bright’s disease. She died at the age of 37 in September 1935. Knowing this about Holtby and the book’s production adds a haunted, tragic quality to a narrative already brimming with big emotions: love, anguish, honour and greed.

Set in the titular South Riding, a fictional district of Yorkshire (the ridings existed; there just wasn’t a South one), Holtby follows the social and political life of those who live there. Holtby uses the administration of the Riding — the decisions made by councillors and Aldermans — to explore class, with South Riding framed as one of the poorer counties in the region. As such, we’re introduced to a varied cast of characters, covering the social gamut, whether it be the Hollies who live in the “shacks” (the eldest daughter Lydia a wunderkind) or the oily and manipulative Alderman Snaith, who sees profit in developing parts of the Riding. At the heart of the novel are Richard Carne and Sarah Burton. He is the master of the ailing Maythorpe Hall, a once distinguished estate now running short of cash, Carne selling what he has to keep the banks at bay but also fund the expensive care of his mentally ill and unresponsive wife. Burton is a child of the South Riding who returns home to take on the role of the headmistress of Kilpington Girl’s School, full of feminist ideals and aspirations. The two, predictably, butt heads but also predictably fall in love. And it’s that romantic tension that fuels the emotional engine of the novel.

Other wonderful, memorable characters surround Carne and Burton, most notably seventy-two-year-old Alderman Beddoes, South Riding’s first council-woman inspired by Holtby’s mother. I also loved the frequently ill socialist Joe Astell, the conflicted (and hypocritical) Alfred Huggins, the snobbish Midge Carne, and the aforementioned sly and manipulative Alderman Snaith.

Then there’s the tragedy of Lily Sawdon, dying from cancer but unable to tell her husband, Tom, who decides on a whim to buy the local pub at the worst possible time. Her chapters are the most heartbreaking (what she chooses to do with the Alsatian dog gifted to her by Tom, another poor decision, is… gut-wrenching) because it’s clear that she’s as much a character as she is a reflection of Holtby’s own mortality. 

And that’s the thing about South Riding; it’s a truly dark novel in which death is a constant presence.

It’s also a politically radical novel. One that sees the Nazis on the horizon and yet hopes for a just world where the divisions between the classes are dissolved and where women have the same opportunities as their male counterparts. The ending is hopeful, bittersweet, yes, but hopeful. It’s a hope never realised as three years after the publication of South Riding, the world is again at War. And yet Holtby’s message — her final words about us as a species — still resonates, even more so where the divide between the rich and poor is so vast and where war and slaughter is a daily occurrence. What an astonishing novel. What a legacy.