A New Literary Theme

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 94, 10 April 1941, Page 5

A New Literary Theme

"SOUTH RIDING" grew out of Winifred Holtby’s interest in her mother’s work on local bodies in Yorkshire; for Mrs. Holtby is a county alderman, like the admirable Mrs. Beddows in the’ book. The whole book is about local government, and how it impinges on the lives of dozens of ordinary families in the district she has called South Riding, Now, that’s where I think Winifred Holtby has achieved some-

thing new and great in literature. You and I see a new road being made, a new bridge being built; we pay hospital rates; we lodge a complaint if there’s a bad smell from a drain; we vote for a school committee; we idly observe the building of a block of municipal flats. And it never occurs to us that here, right in the midst of our daily lives, is the stuff of literature. But Winifred Holtby saw it. She looked, not at the new road or the new houses, but at the people who were being affected by them — the family who might have the joy of moving from a hovel to a clean new house; the landlord whose rents were being affected by municipal enterprise-and all the dozens of people who, to varying extents, feel the effects of a motion passed by a county council or other local body. "South Riding" is divided into eight parts, and each part is prefaced by an extract from the minutes of a committee of the county council of the South Riding.-("A Few Minutes With Women Novelists,’ by Margaret Johnston, 2YA, March 15).