‘By God, I’m going to spin’

Winifred Holtby wrote South Riding, a grand sweep of 1930s life in Yorkshire’s sea-facing flatlands, quite literally against a deadline. She completed the novel only weeks before her death, and the manuscript was seen through the press by her lifelong friend Vera Brittain. The book was an instant success, and has never been out of print.

I found my first copy many years ago in the Eastgate Bookshop, Beverley, almost in the shadow of St Mary’s, a twelfth-century church less visited than the famous Minster but just as lovely. My find was a Collins hardback, quite savagely foxed, with a smart green cover yellowed on the spine, the twentieth impression of September 1947. Inexplicably, it was printed in Amsterdam. There can’t have been many printers capable of the job in war-devastated Holland. My introduction to this remarkable woman cost £2. She has repaid the investment many times over. Winifred (calling her Holtby seems too cold) was only 37 when she died in the autumn of 1935, full of literary promise and ideas to make the world a better place. She was an incorrigible supporter of good causes, from a higher age of sexual consent for girls to trades union organization for black workers in South Africa. She was also a tireless advocate of the League of Nations and a director of Time and Tide, in touch with leading politicians of the day. But it is as a novelist that she is best remembered, and South Riding is proof of her conviction that fiction is superior to tract. The novel, sexed up and romanticized by Andrew Davies for the BBC in the recent dramatization, is set in Holderness, a bleak, windswept landscape between the river Humber and the North Sea, dotted with farming hamlets and fringed with seaside resorts. But like the big skies above it, South Riding (1936) has a large canvas filled with many characters (they take up five pages in an explanatory note) and diverse plots. The heroine, Sarah Burton, has returned from London to her native county to take up the headship of a girls’ school. A modern woman with progressive ideas about education, she clashes with one of the governors, Robert Carne, a local landowner of decidedly conservative views, whose high-born wife is in a mental institution. In a dramatic twist that has been compared to that in Jane Eyre, Sarah falls in love with Carne. The outcome is not quite so happy. Their passion falls agonizingly short of consummation, and he dies in a riding accident. Such a brief summary of the plot makes the novel sound like a Mills & Boon tragedy, but there is much more to it than that. Its panoramic view of East Riding life in the mid-1930s is captivating: the politics and corruption of local government, the grinding poverty of life in ‘The Shacks’ shanty town, the humiliation of the Poor Laws, the enduring optimism of Joe Astell, a socialist agitator, the seedy sensuality of a nonconformist lay preacher and the painful intellectual aspirations of a scholarship girl from an impoverished background, Lydia Holly. All these are woven into a pattern shot through with Winifred’s own philosophy, taken from an old Spanish proverb: ‘Take what you want. Take it – and pay for it.’ This, rather than the love interest, is the theme. At the end (and this is a 448-page saga), Sarah strikes a note of questing defiance. At a King’s Jubilee fête, she recalls Cecil Spring-Rice’s hymn ‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’, which speaks of ‘the love that asks no questions’, and she urges her girls:

Don’t let me catch you at any time loving anything without asking questions. Question everything – even what I’m saying now.

Question your government’s policy, question the arms race, question the Kingsport slums, and the economies over feeding school children, and the rule that makes women have to renounce their jobs on marriage, and why the derelict areas are still 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. Vow as much love to your country as you like; serve to the death if necessary . . . But, I implore you, do not forget to question.

These thrilling words were left out of a sentimentalized film version, produced by Alexander Korda in 1938, in which Carne lives and he and Sarah are united in love and an unlikely political alliance against unscrupulous councillors and land developers. But Winifred’s radical message does form the climax of a thirteen-part television adaptation by fellow Yorkshire novelist Stan Barstow, screened by Yorkshire Television in 1974 and still available on DVD today. Barstow’s script is more faithful to the original than the recent BBC version, and when his was made the Holderness country was not so very different from what it had been in the mid-1930s. Quite what Winifred would have made of the various adaptations of South Riding is anybody’s guess. The novelist Robert Harris once told me of his surprise when a Hollywood director blithely introduced a ‘love interest’ into the film version of one of his books. ‘Once you sell to the film industry you had better just forget it,’ he remarked. But with luck, the latest dramatization will have taken readers beyond South Riding to Winifred’s other novels, most of which were strongly shaped by her upbringing in rural Yorkshire. Winifred was born in Rudston, near Bridlington, in 1898, the younger daughter of a farmer, and educated at a local boarding-school. Her mother, Alice, published a volume of her daughter’s poetry when she was only 13, but Winifred’s literary career did not take off for more than a decade. After service with a signals unit in France at the close of the First World War, she graduated from Somerville College, Oxford, where she met and fell under the influence of Vera Brittain. Winifred’s first novel, Anderby Wold, was published in 1923. It tellsthe story of a farmer’s wife who falls for a radical stranger who wanders into her rural idyll. Her first literary foray rehearses the themes of her last work, and it’s the one I enjoy most after her masterpiece. More limited in scope and more pastoral in setting than South Riding, this ‘imaginary story of imaginary events on an imaginary farm’ introduces us to the social conflicts and personal relationships that characterize her final work. Set in the East Riding of a decade earlier, it tells the story of the Robson farming family and their trials in life. Into their ordered existence comes David Rossitur, a red-headed, magnetic young man from ‘down south’ travelling the Wolds to spread the gospel of socialism. He tries to organize farm workers into a trades union and Mary Robson, the mistress of Anderby Wold farm and a prominent figure in the community, has (surprisingly) read his left-wing tract on the exploitation of labourers. She finds his ideas and his personality uncomfortably appealing, and is first intrigued by and then attracted to him. The furthest their passion gets is a stolen kiss in a cornfield. This is Miss Holtby, remember. Sex is in the air, not on the page. Meanwhile, agricultural society around them is convulsed by a strike, and accelerating social change in the years before the First World War. Mary embodies the troubled nature of the times, and is substantially based on Winifred’s mother. David exhibits the radical outlook of Winifred herself, impatient to change the world. But there is another character. The ceaseless rhythm of the seasons, the farms, the beasts and the old ways of doing things make the land to Mary ‘a more definite personality than any of the people she knew’. The landscape makes itself more strongly felt even than in South Riding, a quality enhanced by the Wolds dialect spoken by minor characters. Winifred’s themes of later years begin to show here. Stuck with her unromantic husband after David’s death, Mary ponders ‘those fine things – courage, justice, service’ that energized the writer’s own short life. Only thirteen years separate the youthful zest of Anderby Wold from the dogged fight against world-weariness of South Riding, but the contrast feels like – indeed, is – the journey of a lifetime. A year after her first novel came The Crowded Street, which examines the impact of the Great War on a young woman and her generation. This was followed in 1927 by The Land of Green Ginger, a sad chronicle of a farmer’s wife trapped in the harsh reality of a Yorkshire farm. Poor Caroline (1931) is the story of a woman obsessed with a Christian cinema company, forlornly in love with a vicar and surrounded by chancers, while Mandoa, Mandoa! (1933) was based on her experiences in South Africa. In 1926, Winifred had gone there on a lecture tour for the League of Nations and had startled her hosts by making close contacts with the virtually outlawed trades unions for black workers. On her return to England she recruited a Scot, William Ballinger, to go out to South Africa to help organize them and she financed his (largely ineffectual) efforts for several years with her earnings from writing. Mandoa, Mandoa!, subtitled A Comedy of Irrelevance, is set in a ‘near Abyssinian country’ and follows the comic fortunes of a group of European guests at a royal wedding, somewhat in the vein of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, but not quite as funny. It is Winifred’s only attempt at a comic novel, written when symptoms of the kidney disease that was to kill her first began to appear. A collection of short stories, Truth Is Not Sober, followed in 1934 and The Frozen Earth and Other Poems a year later, as she was writing South Riding in lodgings in the seaside towns of Hornsea and Withernsea. Winifred also published a number of political books, of only historical interest, and a penetrating study of Virginia Woolf, who put her down as a writer who ‘learned to read while minding the pigs’. In addition there is a selection of letters and a stimulating biography, The Clear Stream (1999), by Marion Shaw. The canon is completed by Testament of Friendship (1940), Vera Brittain’s memoir of their friendship, which was in fact more than that, indeed, a kinship. The two lived together for many years, even after Vera married an American academic. Winifred often saw herself as the less creative of the pair, but this is not true. Brittain’s emotional autobiography, Testament of Youth (1933), remains a classic, but her amateurish foray into fiction is now forgotten, whereas Winifred’s novels are as readable now as when they were first written. Vera wrote largely about herself, Winifred about others and her enduring love of life. Rumours of a lesbian relationship between the two have surfaced many times, without proof. Vera’s daughter, the politician Shirley Williams, has vehemently rejected the suggestion. Winifred nursed a largely unrequited love for Harry Pearson, a friend from her teenage years and something of a wastrel. It is probable that they had a brief sexual relationship in the unromantic setting of a Withernsea lodging-house as Winifred struggled frantically to finish South Riding before her untimely death from Bright’s disease. But her love for life was not unfulfilled. Like her heroine, Sarah Burton, she could say to the world, ‘I was born to be a spinster, and by God, I’m going to spin.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 32 © Paul Routledge 2011