South Riding - Couverture souple

Holtby, Winifred

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0860689697 ISBN 13 : 9780860689690

Editeur : Virago, 2010

Synopsis

'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

***
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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Winifred Holtby (1898-1935) was an English journalist and novelist. Holtby was a committed socialist and feminist who wrote the classic South Riding as a warm yet sharp social critique of the well-to-do farming community she was born into. This was adapted into a British Drama film and later a television adaptation by the BBC. She wrote a lot of literary fiction, biographies and memoirs. She was a good friend of Vera Brittain, possibly portraying her as Delia in The Crowded Street. She died at the age of thirty-seven.

À propos de la quatrième de couverture

[quotes tk]

Life in Yorkshire's town of South Riding is hard-won. A working-class man sinks worries in pub pints. A mother who can barely feed her six children finds herself pregnant again. A Methodist minister falls prey to blackmail. A wife, dying of cancer, struggles to tell her husband. A bright teenager dreams of university but instead lives in squalor, raising her several orphaned siblings. Beneath it all is a fear of another world war breaking out, while the country still reels from the last one.

This is the world Sarah Burton returns to. After years away experiencing the world, she brings bright idealism and a desire for change to a local girl's school, determined to make a difference. But the community is suspicious and entrenched in their traditions - and none more so than Robert Carne of Maythorpe Hall. He stands for everything Sarah despises: a rich, titled farmer whose opinions hold unearned influence. Yet Sarah cannot help being drawn to this proud, haunted - and almost ruined - man.

South Riding is a rich, panoramic novel, bringing vividly to life a rural community on the brink of change.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Virago
• Date d'édition: 2010
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0860689697
• ISBN 13: 9780860689690
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 544
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Hachette Ireland; info@hbgi.ie; ; 8 Castlecourt Centre, Castleknock Road, Castleknock, Dublin 15, D15 XTP3; Dublin; Irlande