Category Archives: Holtby, Winifred

A Century Of Women – 1920’s

I have fallen behind in reviews for both of my Century projects, so I’m going to be posting quick, short, multi-book posts until I catch up. Which will probably be never.

I haven’t quite finished up the 1920’s yet, with 1920, 1921 & 1928 still open. This year, I’ve finished books for 1923, 1925 & 1928.

Anderby Wold
by Winifred Holtby
Rating: ★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1923
Genre: fiction
Pages: 278
ReRead?: No
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of women

Mary Robson is a young Yorkshire woman, married to her solid, unromantic cousin, John. Together they battle to preserve Mary's neglected their beloved farm, Anderby Wold. This labour of love - and the benevolent tyranny of traditional Yorkshire ways - has made Mary old before her time.

Then into her purposeful life comes David Rossitur. Young, red-haired, charming, how can she help but love him? But David is from a different England - radical and committed to social change. As their confrontation and its consequences inevitably unfold, Mary's life and that of the calm village of Anderby are changed forever.

I finished Anderby Wold, published in 1923, in February. I am a huge fan of Winifred Holtby’s South Riding – so much so that I have been considering rereading it. I didn’t like Anderby Wold nearly as much as that one, although it was still an enjoyable read. In some ways, it felt like an obvious precurser to South Riding, set in the same sort of a location and with similar, if less well-defined, characters. Anderby Wold was Holtby’s first novel, but feels like a mature novel nonetheless.

There are also connections to be made to the work of Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte’s lesser known book, Shirley, both of which focus on the changes that industrialization and modernity bring to small, rural British farming communities.

Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: May 14, 1925
Genre: classic
Pages: 197
ReRead?: Yes
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of women

In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation while in her mind she is much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house, she is flooded with far-away remembrances. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices she has made, hesitantly looking ahead to growing old. Undeniably triumphant, this is the inspired novelistic outline of human consciousness.

I just finished Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway last week, so it is fresh in my mind. Published in 1925, it takes place on a single day in June (June 18 seems to be the day that has been designated as Dalloday), so I decided to re-read it on its centenary. I didn’t finish it one day, which is apparently a thing, where people read Mrs. Dalloway contemporaneously with the times that are vaguely identified within the novel by the ringing of Big Ben. I had forgotten how much of the novel is spent away from Clarissa Dalloway, in the lives of other characters as they move through London.

I have not read a lot of Woolf’s work. I’ve previously posted about her first novel, The Voyage Out, and I’ve read her (second most) famous novel To The Lighthouse, although it’s been years.

Reading Mrs. Dalloway really worked for me this time. I often struggle with stream of consciousness, but with this reading, I was really able to let go of my need for linearity and plot and just immerse myself in the words. It has inspired me to seek out more Woolf over the next few years.

Young Anne
by Dorothy Whipple
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1927
Genre: fiction
Pages: 292
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women

Young Anne (1927), was Dorothy Whipple’s debut novel. It is about the first twenty years of a girl’s life: she lives at home mostly looked after by the kindly Emily, goes to school, falls in love and finally marries someone else.

Young Anne is Dorothy Whipple’s first and most autobiographical novel.

I can never go wrong reading Dorothy Whipple. This was my third of her novels, after The Priory (my favorite so far) and Because of the Lockwoods. There is something about her books that are completely engaging to me; each time I have started a Whipple, I haven’t been able to put it down until I finish the last page. This is true even when her books are very long – I spent five hours on my couch reading The Priory. Young Anne was my least favorite of the three so far, but was not an exception to this rule.

Young Anne is Whipple’s first novel, published in 1927, and is a bildungsroman of the title character who seems to be a bit of a stand-in for Dorothy herself. We follow Anne from childhood, through first love, first job, and marriage to a much older and wealthy doctor.

I feel like I could read all of Whipple’s novels in about two weeks, they are so engaging. But, if I were to do that, then I would have entirely run out of Whipples and have no more to anticipate. So, instead, I am spreading out the reading. I actually own one of them, Someone at a Distance, which is sitting on my book cart, waiting for me to pick up.

South Riding by Winifred Holtby

South Riding
by Winifred Holtby
Publication Date: April 12, 1936
Genre: classic, fiction
Pages: 492
Project: a century of women

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Winifred Holtby's greatest novel was published posthumously

Winifred Holtby's masterpiece is a rich evocation of the lives and relationships of the characters of South Riding. Sarah Burton, the fiery young headmistress of the local girls' school; Mrs Beddows, the district's first alderwoman—based on Holtby's own mother; and Robert Carne, the conservative gentleman-farmer locked in a disastrous marriage—with whom the radical Sarah Burton falls in love. Showing how public decisions can mold the individual, this story offers a panoramic and unforgettable view of Yorkshire life.

I did struggle with this book at the beginning. There were too many characters, and I do maintain that Winifred Holtby spent far too much time on people who were not Sarah Burton, Emma Beddows or Robert Carne, most particularly Reverend Huggins, about whose hypocrisy I simply could not care, and the Sawdon storyline, with poor Lily dying of some sort of cancerous tumor. This is not a book written for the 2018 attention-span, which has been decimated by the influence of social media and our tendency to flit from one thing to the next. It’s a deep dive, not a surface treatment.

And once I let myself really get going in the book, I fell in love.

Sarah Burton, the schoolmistress of the South Riding girl’s school, is a marvelous character. Unmarried, by choice, not necessity –

She had been engaged to marry three different men. The first, a college friend, was killed on the Somme in 1916; the second, a South African farmer, irritated her with his political dogmatism until they quarrelled furiously and irreparably; the third, an English Socialist member of Parliament, withdrew in alarm when he found her feminism to be not merely academic but insistent.

– she said of herself:

“No chance of a love-affair here in the South Riding and a good thing too. I was born to be a spinster, and by God, I’m going to spin.

Her story was the one that I loved the most – a youngish, not especially pretty but still immensely attractive woman who has managed by sheer force of will to get a school for herself. She sees the future in her girls, a future that doesn’t require them to give up themselves for a man. As she says to them (in possibly my favorite quote of the book):

Question your government’s policy, question the arms race, question the Kingsport slums, and the economics over feeding school children, and the rule that makes women have to renounce their jobs on marriage, and why the derelict areas still are derelict. This is a great country, and we are proud of it, and it means much that is most lovable. But questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence.

There are dozens of amazing quotes, like the one above, and so much truth here. Emma Beddows was my second favorite character – a seventyish woman who is also a local Alderman, who sees the role of local government as the place where things get done. She says of herself:

I’m an old woman. But when you’re seventy you don’t always feel old. I know I don’t. There are times when you find yourself thinking of yourself as a girl. “Now the girl went downstairs.” “Now the girl put her hat on.” And then you look in the glass and there’s a stiff heavy lump of an elderly person facing you, your face all wrinkles and the life gone out of your limbs. But you can still feel young.

South Riding is a book that focuses on the public and private lives of women. The men are, largely, foils to the women, especially the bankrupt gentleman farmer, Robert Carne, who ends up as the object of devoted passion by both Miss Burton and Mrs. Beddows, though that passion is quite different between the women. It’s not a love story, though, unless the love is love of independence, of purpose, of a woman’s life lived beyond hearth and home, as this exchange between Mrs. Beddows and Sarah Burton illustrates:

‘You don’t believe then in a higher Providence?’

‘Not if it means just knuckling under as soon as things grow difficult, and calling that God’s will. I think we have to play our own Providence – for ourselves and for future generations. If the growth of civilisation means anything, it means the gradual reduction of the areas ruled by chance – Providence, if you like.’ . . .

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.

“Take what you want,” says God. “Take it and pay for it.”

I think that South Riding will hold up well to rereads, and that I will likely get something new out of every reading. A story written around the activities of the local parish government is, perhaps, an odd way to tell a story about a place, but it works incredibly well here. And Winifred Holtby wasn’t wrong when she said:

‘all this local government, it’s just people working together – us ordinary people, against the troubles that afflict us all.’

Even with what seemed like a slow beginning, this was a five star read for me.