Like South Riding, Anderby Wold is set in Yorkshire and deals with a community struggling with social change.  Mary Robson is a young woman who has married her cousin in order to have the means to pay off the mortgage on her family farm and the skills to keep it running.  Life in Anderby Wold is hard but quiet until David Rossitur, a young handsome social reformer, arrives and begins to shake things up, not least on Mary Robson’s farm.

Anderby Wold is nowhere near as polished and accomplished as South Riding but it is by no means a bad novel; Winifrd Holtby not at her best is still Winifred Holtby after all.  Its focus is narrower, on a few key players rather than each individual in a community, but many of the themes which will be developed and expanded in her later work are present in their nuculaic form here.  There is the same emphasis on the indivdual as part of the community and the differences between individual responsibility and social responsibility.  It’sreally very difficult not to make this sound incredibly dull, but in fact it paints a fascinating picture of a community going through a time of quiet but important change.

One of the things that has impressed me about both Holtby novels that I’ve read so far is her ability to create characters who are neither inherently good nor inherently bad.  Everyone has an opinion that they think is right and good: giving to the poor, workers’ rights and social equality.  It’s difficult to disagree with any of them individually, but each character’s approach towards achieving what is right is somehow at odds with that of the others and therein lies the conflict.  People do bad things, but noone is bad.  There is no villain to boo; instead there is a complicated moral maze which Holtby refuses to guide the reader through.  Instead she happily abandons you there, leaving you to find your own way out, and that for me was the main appeal of Anderby Wold.

Anderby Wold by Winifred Holtby.  Published by Virago, 2011, pp. 278.  Originally published in 1923.

The evening began with a discussion about the two editions of the book currently available: the lovely new Virago edition, the cover of which is from an old Yorkshire railway poster, and the television tie-in edition which is published by another company.  We were all rather surprised to learn that the BBC edition wasn’t from Virago, but apparently since Winifred Holtby has been dead for more than seventy years, South Riding is now in the public domain and can therefore be published by anyone.  However, Vera Brittain’s estate gave Virago permission to use an afterward that she wrote which hasn’t been published since the 1930′s (if my memory serves me correctly) and their version also features an introduction by Shirley Williams, Vera Brittain’s daughter, so it’s worth choosing this edition for the extra material alone, not to mention the vastly superior cover.  We all agreed that we prefer not to buy television tie-in editions with actors on the cover as we prefer to imagine the characters ourselves rather than to have a preconceived idea of what they look like before we begin to read.

Interestingly (and unusually) I seemed to be the only person there who had watched the recent BBC adaptation of South Riding.  I had enjoyed it for what it was, but it wasn’t a patch on the book because it had to take a much more narrow focus than the novel, essentially turning it into a love story with a bit of social reform thrown in.  I think that this is partly because of the time constraints of adapting such a wide-reaching novel into three hour long segments and partly because I just don’t think it would have worked on the screen.  As we discussed, one of the most impressive things about this book is that Winifred Holtby takes so many different characters from a huge range of backgrounds and professions and makes them all individuals that the reader knows personally and who have fascinating stories to tell.  To have so many characters in a television programme would just have been confusing, rather than providing the amazing cross-section of society that it does in the book.

We chatted a bit about how we had all come to read the book; some people had read it when they were younger and then read it again for the Book Club, but the majority of us had only discovered it because of the Book Club and so were suitably grateful!  People tried to come up with a book that we would say that South Riding is most like in order to describe it to other people who haven’t yet heard of it.  Middlemarch of course was mentioned (making me all the more eager to get round to reading it myself) and also the Rabbit books by John Updike which I’ve not investigated before.  I wish I’d noted them down at the time, because anything that purports to be like South Riding (and indeed, anything recommended by the lovely people at the meeting) has to be worth reading.

We also discussed Winifred Holtby’s relationships with the two incredibly strong and influential women in her life: her mother and Vera Brittain.  We were read some extracts from a biography of Winifred Holtby called The Clear Stream by Marion Shaw which sounds fascinating and is now lurking in my Amazon shopping basket waiting for me to feel justified in buying books again to click and purchase, as it’s apparently no longer in print and is quite pricey second hand.  Both were clearly women that Winifred respected, almost to the point of denying her own talents in deference to theirs; there was a particularly interesting exceprt from a letter than Winifred wrote to Vera saying that the fact that Winifred had been asked to write a biography of Virginia Woolf was obviously a reflection on her friendship with Vera rather than on her own personal merits as an author and journalist.  It’s no wonder that she was like this given her mother, who seems to have been a formidable character who liked to be in control of her daughter.  We’re all very thankful that Winifred Holtby ignored her mother’s displeasure to write South Riding and that Vera Brittain ensured that it was published.

I left having had a wonderful evening, clutching a copy of the new Virago reissue of Anderby Wold, Winifred Holtby’s first novel.  I started it on the train home and have now devoured it completely, so thank you to Virago for organising another lovely event and for introducing me to such a great author.

South Ridingis set in Yorkshire in the first half of the 1930′s, focusing on the everyday lives of the people who live there.  There is Sarah Burton, the new headmistress of the girls’ school who returns to the area armed with progressive ideas and is determined to make a difference; there is Mrs Beddows, the council’s only female alderman who is torn between her desire for progress and her personal loyalties; and there is Robert Carne, staunch proponent of the old ways, desperately trying to care for his mad wife and fragile daughter while not losing his tenuous hold on his lands.  The book chronicles their struggles, sometimes against each other, sometimes alongside one another for a common cause, and those of a whole host of other characters.

The cast of this novel is huge, with more than a hundred characters (listed handily after the introduction), but it never feels overpopulated or confusing.  In fact, they are what makes South Riding such a great read.  I felt as though I knew each and every one of those characters, even if we only had a nodding acquaintance.  It is testament to Winifred Holtby’s writing skill that she manages to create such a wide variety of characters with equal authenticity; I believe in Midge Carne, who is young, female, highly strung and unthinkingly cruel, just as much as I believe in Castle, who is an elderly, male, gentle salt of the earth type.  I particularly liked the fact that no character is as straightforward as they at first seem, and not in a gimmicky everyone-has-a-dark-secret way, but in a these-are-all-real-people-with depth way.  They aren’t defined by their quirks, but these help to gain a deeper insight into the characters and why they behave the way they do.  Councillor Snaith at home with his cats was a particular favourite of mine.

A wide range of characters means a wide range of relationships, and here too Winifred Holtby excels.  Whether two people are cooperating or at loggerheads they always act in a way that is so appropriate and well described that I experienced everything along with them.  Tom and Lily’s relationship broke my heart time and time again, and they are relatively minor characters (if there can be said to be such a thing in this novel).  Not only does she write scenes tightly focused on one individual or group, she also writes the best, most effective crowd scenes I’ve ever read.  The outside performance put on by Madam Hubbard’s girls, at which cast and audience alike spend more time focusing on their own individual thoughts and agendas than the show, is an absolute masterpiece.  Her writing reveals a wealth of life experience put to very good use.

I also appreciated the fact that, although people struggle and fight with one another, there is no cruel, cackling villain in this book.  The characters go through hard times and experience tragedy, but that is because life is hard rather than because someone is plotting against them.  Harvests fail so people lose their money.  People become sick and, because they are poor, they die.  It’s all very matter-of-fact and realistic.  This may make the novel sound rather bleak, and it’s definitely not without its bleak moments, but there is also a great deal of comedy in this book.  There is stoicism but there is also humour; the people of South Riding endure hardships and they do so with a shrug and a grin.  Despite some of the tragedies that occur, Holtby never allows characters to wallow or the tightly controlled plot to spiral into melodrama, which I find only adds to the pathos.  I’m sad to leave South Riding and it’s definitely a novel that I’ll be rereading in the future.

Unlike The Vet’s Daughter where I thought that the original cover was far superior, in this case I rather prefer the reissued cover.  I had bought myself a copy of the original green edition before Christmas as I was continually hearing good things about this novel and I wanted to have read it before the new BBC adaptation begins later this year, but last week I was surprised to receive a copy of the new edition in the post from the publishers for joining their new book club.  It was this version that I ended up reading, as I was drawn in by the lovely cover art, a reproduction of a Yorkshire Railways poster, which suited the book perfectly.  I also thought that the extra material was better in the newer edition as, while Lettice Cooper’s introduction in the earlier edition is useful, it is mostly a summary of the story and the new preface by Shirley Williams and introduction by Marion Shaw are excellent.

South Riding by Winifred Holtby.  Published by Virago, 2010, pp. 518.  Originally published in 1936.