Winifred Holtby 1898 to 1935

 

Winifred Holtby was born at Rudston, 7 miles from Hunmanby and brought up on her father's farm in the East Riding of Yorkshire. She was still at school at Scarborough when the German Fleet shelled the town in December 1914 - a scene she afterwards described in her second novel 'The Crowded Street.' Winifred Holtby went up to Oxford in 1916, but left almost at once to serve with the women's forces in France, during World War 1. Winifred Holtby returning at the end of the war to take her degree.

In 1921, she came to London, where she divided her time between journalism, social work and lecturing for the League of Nations Union. In her life as in her work she exemplified all that was most generous and hopeful in the period between the two Wold Wars.

Apart from her novels, Winifred Holtby published a bok of short stories, a critical study of Virginia Woolf and a history of the status of women. Her death in 1935 at the early age of 37 was a loss both to lituerature and public life.

 

South Riding

Though South Riding is Winifred Holtby's last, most well known novel, and is well word reading to fully appreciate the peoples history in the local landscape. An almost forget author, from a part of England few explore. The ideal retreat from the pressure of 21st Century Britain.

Winifred Holtby died before it could be published. It marked the peak of a tragically brief literary career and while awareness rose after her tragicly premature death that England had lost a major novelist. Winfred Holtby today is to often forgotten.

The book, is a good historical read, of times past, in the East Riding. The Yorkshire Wold's and East Riding are unspoilt, they still offer miles of quiet country lanes and small settlements. From Hunmanby it is a pleasant bike ride to Rudston, Winifred's birthplace, marked with a blue plaque. 

South Riding is a story of Yorkshire life in the 1930's. It centres round a County Council and as Winifred Holtby herself wrote 'the effect of bye-laws and resolutions on the lives of people like haulage contractors, corn dealers and smalltown drapers. It is full of hunting and agricultural shows and relieving officers and drainage schemes and all things that make up country life.'

It may sound routine, but so are our daily soap operas on TV each night of the week, that are remain popular. It is just set more towards the Humber, 90 years ago. 

While there is no South Riding, only North, East and West. The word Riding is from the shortened Viking word of thriding, a third.  The industrial, smoke blackened West Riding had no place in Winifred Holtby's landscape. But the North and East Ridings have lent their crashing seas, their sweeping Wolds, to give sound and colour to this vivid and compassionate story.