Winifred Holtby's last and perhaps greatest work was published after her death at the age of 37. This novel is a tribute to the land and to the people of East Yorkshire, Holtby's native place.(There is no South Riding in Yorkshire) This is her version of Middlemarch 1935 and it is a masterpiece. South Riding is a novel of Yorkshire between the wars when the social fabric of the society was changing ; the landed gentry were becoming vanishing breed and their lifestyle, like their stately homes, became too extravagent to maintain. It is a novel of social change, Sarah Burton returns to the Riding,no longer the blacksmith's daughter but as an educated woman. She comes home with a Masters (rare in that day),traveled (she has taught in South Africa,)to take over the local girls school. Ms. Burton's goal is to prepare the girls, whatever their social and economic status for their place in a changing civilization. They will become professional women, not soley identified as wives or spinsters but individuals in their own right, their talents developed by their education will be put to use for the communal good. She and the local Squire Robert Carne, who is also on the school board, agree on nothing and her fight for progressive education clashes with his notion of women and their dependence and gentility. Yet, there is an attraction between these antagonists and a respect that transcends their disagreements. There is also a night in a hotel but ... One other major character Mrs. Beddows, the local councilwoman, was based on Holtby's mother who was the first alderwoman elected in Yorkshire, thru her eyes we are made aware of Holtby's belief that when local government puts the needs of their citizens before personal gain, the community benefits and contributes more effectively to the inner workings of a national or global society. Mrs. Holtby was scandalized by South Riding and tried to have it suppressed, fortunately she was not her daughter's literary executrix and to her dismay it was published. The political content was so accurate that Mrs. Holtby resigned. South Riding is a book that acknowledges the cycle of birth and death. There are several deaths in the novel,Holtby virtually willed herself to live long enough to finish her work. Death does not triumph,Holtby's hopes for the new generation foresaw a continuation of love for the land and the community and an elegic respect for the vanished landscape. Through Sarah Burton's eyes, Holtby shares, with the reader, a vision when South Riding would embrace the ideas and progress of the 20th Century and welcome equally the talents of all the Riding's inhabitants.

Winifred Holtby, who died at a tragically young age, came from a generation scarred by the First World War, and determined to build a better future.

It is not difficult to see the author represented in the main character, Sarah Burton, an idealistic, headstrong young woman who comes to a small Yorkshire coastal town in the Thirties to take up a post as headmistress in the local girls school. The book deals enthrallingly and movingly with Sarah, her love for the doomed landowner Robert Carne, and the people she encounters along the way.

South Riding is a dearly-loved book, full of passion and poetry and humour. It deserves to be much better known than it is. The book was the last and greatest work of its young author and I recommend you read it.

Poor Ms. Holtby must be sick to death of her book being confused with the even more out of print Noel Langley's Land of Green Ginger. I don't see Pelican reprinting the latter any time soon - it may be a little bit politically incorrect these days with it's silly proper names for characters from various ethnic groups.

This is a beautiful book, which I'm afraid will get lost in the exorcism of European presence in South Africa. As terrible as Apartheid is and was, a few individual stories should not get lost in the shuffle: among them are The Story of an African Farm, The Flame Trees of Thika, and The Land of Green Ginger.

Joanna is a young woman of English heritage, born in Africa, against whom circumstances conspire to deliver back to England. But Africa, and specifically the land of green ginger is forever with her, and she never quite fits into slow-paced English society. She has an adventuresome spirit that her purely English provincial neighbors perceive as not quite ladylike.

In the beginning, when Joanna is young, she is unaware of how she comes across, and the beauty of Holtby's writing is her ability to communicate the charm and spirit of Joanna to the reader so that the reader finds her appealing, and at the same time, with the same actions, show her time after time committing minor faux pas that make the neighbors wary of her.

Eventually, Joanna realizes just how much she doesn't fit in, and she longs more and more for Africa. She has married a man who shared her longing for something outside of provincial England, but was struck with tuberculosis. She has had two children, and because of her husband's illness, bares almost sole responsibilty for them. By this time we have come to love Joanna, and are rapt, hoping with her to find some way out of the English fog into the African sun, and a happier life for her children. Each step toward or back from Africa is an emotional jolt for the reader, and the end is a long sigh; as we close the book-- or at least as I did, a whispered "Amen."

As a woman approaching her mid thities I have searched for the book 'The Land of Green Ginger'. Now I have found it. If this is not a fair indication of the beauty of the book I don't know what is. It is a childs fantasy (for children of all ages! ), with some familiar characters (Aladin and his mum), and some not so familiar characters (The button nosed tortoise if I remember correctly). They charm you and make you smile. It is all a bit vague now but I shall re-review it after reading it again, but I would still highly recommend this book.

The Crowded Street is really a book more people should know about and read. It portrays Muriel Hammond, a young woman facing the eternal problem of how to make one's way in the world. In addition to this universal appeal, the book also gives an interesting view of Yorkshire life in the early part of the twentieth century. Holtby died young, but left behind a body of work worth reading; this book is an estimable example of her work, and a book worth discovery by a modern reader.