South Riding (Virago Modern Classics)

'One of my favourite novels: a life-enhancing, twentieth-century masterpiece' CHARLOTTE MENDELSON

'Rich in humour and worldly insight' INDEPENDENT

'A novel that works beautifully on all sorts of levels, capturing the life of a whole community even as it offers us the passions, frustrations and tragedies of individual lives. . . I can't say enough good things about this book' SARAH WATERS

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We're so busy resigning ourselves to the inevitable that we don't even ask if it is inevitable. We've got to have courage, to take our future into our hands.

Sarah Burton returns to South Riding as a fiery young headmistress, determined to make a difference for the girls in her care - like bright Lydia Holly, who dreams of a scholarship to escape her family's grinding poverty. But she finds a community teetering on the brink of change, torn between established traditions and new idealism.

She must work with - and against - her new neighbours to fight her cause: Jo Astell, a socialist fighting poverty and his own tuberculosis; Mrs Beddows, the first woman Alderman of the district; the obsequious businessman Snaith; and brooding Robert Carne, a conservative landowner tormented by his disastrous marriage, to whom Sarah finds herself unwillingly drawn.

Winifred Holtby's greatest work is a panoramic evocation of a Yorkshire community between the wars: a rich and moving tapestry of lives, loves, sorrows and triumphs.

This beautiful 90th anniversary edition contains a preface by Shirley Williams, an introduction by Marion Shaw and an epitaph by Vera Brittain.