South Riding

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This tale of universal values mirrored in local experience is not only an achievement of the mind," Brittain wrote in an epigraph to the version of the book published in the United States, reprinted in Virago's new edition, "it is . Holtby had been Brittain's intimate friend since their days at Somerville College, Oxford, in the years immediately following the first world war. Which indeed proved many, though not all, of the problems I had were due to Davies' alterations, and in any event was a treat to read. Indeed, she analysed it with critical precision in her study of Virginia Woolf, published in 1932 (the first biographical and critical work on Woolf to appear in Britain). Ooh, possibly…I know she features briefly in the recent film adaptation of a Testament of Youth, the one with Alicia Vikander in the lead role.

It was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1937 and, over time, has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity with a film, radio dramatizations, and the 2011 BBC series.

Also, I doubt many people will read South Riding for its language alone: Holtby has the good journalist's ability to get to the heart of the matter without excess verbiage, but her use of words is rarely memorable. Through South Riding, Holtby went a long way towards achieving "the shining immortality" that Brittain had wanted for her. But for her appointment to the headmistress-ship Kiplington High School for Girls she would never have met Robert Carne or fallen in love with him.

Blighted by recession and devastated by the loss, they must also come to terms with significant social change. The first edition, first impression, of Winifred Holtby's best known work, 'South Riding', in the original decorative illustrated. Half a chapter of romance that made me well up with an undescribable churning in heart is a testament to Holtby's brilliance. The author had scarlet fever as a girl and as a result, her kidneys unbeknownst to her were damaged.

Holtby makes even her less savoury characters human with likeable qualities, but she leaves the reader to judge; the other characters not knowing all the picture make their own mistakes.

To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. Set in a fictional district of Yorkshire in the early 1930s, South Riding is an epic, life-affirming novel which explores issues of poverty, social mobility and the value of education. Photograph: Nicola Dove/BBC South Riding: Anna Maxwell Martin as Sarah Burton in the new BBC adaptation. Holtby lived with Brittain and her husband for a while and Brittain’s husband was jealous of their friendship. It avoids well-trodden novelistic paths: most of the characters are middle-aged or older, and first love doesn't appear even as a subplot.But if Carne is in some ways a modern Rochester (and in the novel as opposed to the tv version, this is even lampshaded because of course Sarah has read Jane Eyre and the comparison occurs to her), the relationship goes another way.

After Holtby's death, Brittain attempted to repay the debt by ensuring, as her friend's literary executor, that her final and most significant work saw the light of day. Meanwhile, the spectre of war seems to be everywhere – not only the fallout following WW1 but the threat of another conflict just hovering on the horizon.Kiplington, the coastal town where Sarah Burton is headmistress, is an amalgam of Hornsea and Withernsea, the seaside towns where Holtby lodged while writing the book. It has never been out of print and sold 40,000 copies in the first year in the UK and 20,000 copies in the US.