Tag: south-riding • BookLikes

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text 2019-07-02 20:35

BL-opoly: Independence Day Extra Rolls

Themis-Athena's Garden of Books

Dshamilja - Ulrich Matthes,Chingiz Aitmatov

The Night Visitor - James D. Doss,Romy Nordlinger

South Riding - Winifred Holtby,Carole Boyd

Wedlock: How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met His Match - Wendy Moore,Rachel Atkins

Hooo boy. So, it turns out my Independence Day extra rolls are sending me right around the board. Doubles, novelty cards ... Anyway, here we go:

I just finished my current read, which was for square 2 ("Who?").

My first roll, starting from there, sends me to square 9: The Stay-Cation -- read a book that includes a visit to a museum, a concert, a library, or a park, or whose author's name begins with one of the letters in R-E-L-A-X. My selection for this square is Chingiz Aitmatov's Jamilia.

My next roll are doubles, sending me to square 12: The Robot -- which I pocket ...

... and roll again twice; once for the doubles, once for having landed on a novelty card square.

The first of these rolls sends me to square 18: Mountain Cabin -- read a book set west of the Mississippi, written by an author from that region, or considered part of the Western genre. What a great opportunity to catch up with one of my recently-discovered favorite mystery series: My pick for this square is James D. Doss's Charlie Moon mystery no. 5, The Night Visitor.

My next roll moves me on to square 20: The Lake House -- read a book featuring a dog, with a dog on the cover, or set in an area known for its lakes or on a fictional lake. I'm going to bow to Moonlight Reader's greater wisdom here, since she read it earlier this year, but given that Winifred Holtby's South Riding is set in rural Britain in the first half of the 20th century, I am fairly hopeful that at least one dog is going to make an appearance in this book.

My final Independence Day roll turns out to be, once more, doubles, putting me on a square I know very well at this point, given that I am stopping by there for the third time in this game (and for the second time in a week): square 26: "How?" -- read a book that is science fiction or has the word "how" in the title. Fortunately, I just downloaded a matching book, so I will be reading Wendy Moore's Wedlock: How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met His Match.

I roll again for the doubles ... which lands me on another novelty card square, the Scottie dog --

-- so I get a final roll for having landed on a novelty card square, which ultimately gets me to "GO" ... which, somehow, seems like a very fitting conclusion to this whole set of manoevers!

Now just imagine I had decided to just get those extra rolls out of the way quickly before going to bed! I am really glad that I didn't ... I'd have been up until the wee small hours getting all of this sorted!

Anyway, here's how the whole thing plays out on the card:

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review 2018-12-20 16:58

A feminist manifesto in a sprawling British saga

Abandoned by user

South Riding - Winifred Holtby,Shirley Williams,Marion Shaw

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.

But 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:

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 the slow beginning, this was a five star read for me.

Winifred Holtby virago modern classics all the vintage ladies 1936

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text 2018-12-20 02:11

Reading progress update: I've read 82%.

Abandoned by user

I haven't updated this one recently - right after I posted my last update, it took off. I'm thoroughly engaged in the inhabitants of South Riding at this point!

Winifred Holtby virago modern classics all the vintage ladies 1936

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text 2018-12-12 15:45

Reading progress update: I've read 32%.

Abandoned by user

At this point, I'm struggling with this book. The writing is top notch, but there are so many characters and we're skipping around so much that I'm not really getting a good sense of person or place.

The plot summary makes it sound as though the book concentrates on Sarah Burton, the new headmistress to the local school. So far, though, our engagement with Miss Burton has been minimal. I'm hoping that now that the characters and the community have been introduced, Holtby settles in and gives us a bit more of a narrative.

Reading for my A Century of Women project - this is the book for 1936.

Winifred Holtby virago modern classics all the vintage ladies a century of women 1936

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review 2017-02-17 23:56

Politics, drama, and horses...not necessarily in that order

Reading For The Heck Of It

I decided to tackle a rather formidable bit of fiction pretty much on a whim in the form of South Riding by Winifred Holtby. It took me much longer to read than I had anticipated but that's just a good lesson that sometimes you need to take your time with a book. :-) Apparently this book is a literary classic although I had only heard about it recently through a YouTube channel (Mercy's Bookish Musings if you're curious). What drew my interest (besides the gorgeous cover art) was the setting which is a small area of Yorkshire. (As some of you may know, I'm kinda obsessed with the English countryside and I had the very good luck to visit Yorkshire in 2015 and fell a lot in love with it. THE MOORS, YA'LL.) South Riding is a fictional area of Yorkshire where city councilmen (and a councilwoman) pretty much run the show. If you've ever lived in a small town, particularly a rural one, then you'll recognize the intricate balance between government "officials" and their fellow townspeople. This was set in 1933-35 right at the start of WWII when the country was still harboring hope that the war could be avoided. Our main character, Sarah Burton, is a headmistress who is a revolutionary (at least to the people in South Riding) and ready to shake things up. The lone female on the City Council, Mrs. Beddowes, sees in Sarah a chance to improve the reputation of the school but she also feels that she can muster some amount of control over her (spoiler alert: this is doomed to fail). There are quite a few side stories such as that of Lydia Holly who lives in poverty but aspires to be an academic success the likes of which South Riding has never before seen. Not to mention the rather despicable men who like Mrs. Beddowes are on the City Council. One of them really turned my stomach. *shudder* I went into this book thinking that it was likely to be a romantic tale but if anything the romance was between the characters and their town. It's quite plain that Holtby harbors a nostalgic love of the Yorkshire where she grew up and it's palpable on nearly every single page of this book. If for nothing else, I enjoyed South Riding because of this. Otherwise, it wasn't exactly a life changing read (read Dickens for that). I'd give it a solid 6/10.

fiction wwii classic relationships family mental illness feminism death yorkshire Winifred Holtby political Religious Class Issues small town life Adultery south riding

Source: readingfortheheckofit.blogspot.com