Backlisted - South Riding by Winifred Holtby

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

Our guests are Tanya Kirk, Lead Curator of Printed Heritage Collections 1601-1900 at The British Library, and Backlisted's old friend Una McCormack, a New York Times bestselling author. We are discussing Winifred Holtby's classic final novel South Riding, published posthumously in 1936 and widely admired for its broad canvas of social realism and as a classic of early feminism. Also in this episode John updates us on his progress through Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob (Fitzcarraldo), translated by Jennifer Croft; while Andy has been reading My Rock 'n' Roll Friend (Canongate), Tracey Thorn's memoir of her longstanding friendship with Lindy Morrison, the former drummer of The Go-Betweens. Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)07:51 - My Rock 'n' Roll Friend by Tracey Thorn14:06 - The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk18:54 - South Riding by Winifred Holtby* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in the floral hall in the Yorkshire seaside town of Kiplington in the South Riding. floral hall in the Yorkshire seaside town of Kiplington in the South Riding. It's a warm August evening in 1932 and we're here for a grand gala evening organised by the redoubtable Madame Hubbard. The Kiplington Memorial Subscription Band have just finished their classical overture. The stage is suddenly filled with 50 young women, their faces painted, their hair waved or frizzed

or cork-strewed into ringlets, are about to launch into the song of welcome. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. Sorry. Such a brilliant introduction. Kick high, ladies, kick high. I've been practising Lily of Laguna. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of

Reading Dangerously, and we're joined today by two guests, one new and one returning. Tanya Kirk and Oona McCormack. Hello. Hello. Our new guest is Tanya Kirk. Tanya is the lead curator of Printed Heritage Collections 1601 to 1900 at the British Library. A specialist in literary collections, she co-curated six major exhibitions, including ones on science fiction, Gothic literature, Shakespeare, and the British landscape in literature. She's also edited four collections of classic ghost stories taken from books and periodicals in the British Library for the series Tales of the Weird,

the most recent of which is sunless solstice strange christmas tales for the longest nights tanya i reckon your job is one that loads of our listeners would at least like to have a two-week uh turn at what is the rarest or most valuable book that you have held in your two hands it's probably the the first quarter of hamlet which there's so there's only two copies in the world it's a text that is disputed possibly it's like done from memory from one of the players i performed in it yeah so there's only only two and we've got the only copy that has the last page. Wow that's a good answer yes I will accept it. I've got a question though when you read books at home then I'm assuming that there's

two strands of thought as regards books should you treat them well because they are important objects or should you show your love by breaking their spines turning the corners scribbling on them and generally vandalizing them you can't wonder if you can guess which school i subscribe to it's the former so when but when you're now you can't do that to one of the only existing copies of hamlet presumably i don't know what goes on at the bl but at home are you respectful of books or are you a vandal? I'm very respectful of books, although sometimes if there's a mistake in them, I do correct it in pencil.

I love it when I get people who don't know. I love that. People do that in London library copies, I've noticed. They like to let you know that they were there 40 years ago, touching. Could you countenance Alex Christoffi, former guest, wonderful biographer of Dostoevsky, caused absolute mayhem on Twitter when he confessed that he'd take a paperback on holiday and he'd rip out, once he'd finished reading, he'd rip it out and bin the rest. I've done that.

I haven't binned it. I haven't binned it. I haven't binned it. I was going on a long haul flight and I'd been reading The Golden Notebook which is quite a hefty... Doris Lessing Yeah, yeah. And I only had about 50 pages left to go.

In my defence it was a really, really cheap paperback edition it was practically broken anyway. So I cut it down the spine and I left the big dish at home my stomach has lurched I'm in pain I'd got it for two dollars or something in a in a book sale did you sellotape it back afterwards uh no I think it's I think it's just on the shelf in two bits the thing is though right I know there's no right or wrong way to do this but i can't stand that thing that you see people saying oh books deserve to be loved oh they've been oh they've

been scrunched up and i stuck them down the lab and uh i showed how much i loved them by bashing them with a hammer and to prove that i read them right it's absolutely nonsense how do you not break the spine of a really big book? He doesn't read the middle of the book. It's like the last third. Yeah, reading really carefully. I really struggle with paperbacks because it is so hard to not break the spine. So I do mainly buy hardbacks.

That's a good digression. Oh, it's going to be a long episode. Right. And thank you very much, Tanya. And the returning guest, as regular listeners will have already recognised, the book slayer, the voice of the book slayer herself, Storm Una McCormack, making her sixth appearance on Backlist. Really?

That many? Having previously joined us for episodes dedicated to Anita Bruckner, Georgette Heyer, Russell Hoban, J.R.R. Tolkien, Terence Dix and William Golding. That's her seventh appearance, John.

You can't count. One, two, three, four, five, six. This is her seventh appearance. And later on, I'm going to get a copy of a book by each one of those and I'm gonna cut it down the spine that is an eclectic mix that's what we call range una that's what we call range you're on the doctor? Terrence Dicks. Oh, sorry. Terrence Dicks. Sorry. Doctor Who isn't an author, Tanya. I hate to say it. Or is she?

I love it. If you like that kind of chippy feminism, keep listening to this episode. Una is a new... That's chippy feminism in inverted commas. Before you write and complain at me. Una is a New York Times bestselling writer of TV tie-in novels, most recently The Autobiography of Mr Spock. Let's have a round of applause for that.

Oh, that was fun. That's Mr Spock from Star Trek, everybody. A former university lecturer in creative writing, she continues to mentor writers and is on the editorial board for GoldSF, an imprint of Goldsmith Press, publishing feminist science fiction. We're so pleased to have you both here. Thank you for having me back. The book we're here to discuss is South Riding by Winifred Holtby,

the classic Yorkshire novel, described by some as the great novel of local government. But don't let that put you off. It has many strings to its fictional bow, not least the fact that it was first published by William Collins in 1936, five months after Winifred Hockley had died from Bright's disease at the age of 37. So South Routing has been in print ever since and has been adapted several times for film, radio and television,

South Routing has been in print ever since and has been adapted several times for film, radio and television, perhaps most memorably by Stan Barstow in 1974 for Yorkshire Television, but more of that later. Before we brave the sea frets and the subcommittee minutes, I must ask the old question. Andy, what have you been reading this week? Thank you, John. I've been reading a book by Tracy Thorne

called My Rock and Roll Friend, which is about Lindy Morrison. Now, I've read all of Tracy Thorne's books. Her first, Bedsit Disco Queen, then Naked at the Albert Hall, then Another Planet, which is her book about suburbia. And now this one, My Rock and Roll roll friend and this is my favorite of her books and i think is probably her best book to date um if listeners don't know who lindy morrison is or tracy thorne um tracy thorne is a singer and songwriter who for many years has been a member of everything but the girl and lindy morrison is an artist and musician who was for many years the drummer in the original line-up of the Australian band The Go-Betweens. Tracy's book about her friendship with Lindy goes back to the 1980s.

They met backstage, I think I'm right in saying, at a gig. And really it's a book about the ways in which rock and roll is perceived as a boy thing and um despite my lifelong battle not to be seen as a bloke I read this book and thought, hmm, I am guilty of some of the behaviours within this. And even at the age, yes, Nicky's nodding, you are Andy, even at the age of like 53, I thought you can always get, you can always do better, right? I don't really like the go-betweens. So it might be easier for me than it might be for some of our listeners to take this book on its own terms, because one of the things it does is it talks about Robert Forster and Grant MacLennan, who were the songwriters in The Go-Betweens, but it tries to recontextualise them, not as the leaders of the group, but of two of the members of the group, trying to say The Go-Betweens would not have been the go-betweens without the chemistry, influence, musical contributions of Lindy Morrison.

But it's in the nature of how we talk about rock and roll, or many art forms, to marginalise not just women, but also drummers. This is a very pro-drummer book. not just women, but also drummers. This is a very pro-drummer book. So really, Tracy's book is a sort of very witty, readable, polite corrective. It's telling the story of a group that you think you might know about and the role of a woman within a group

that you think you might understand in a different way. And I found it incredibly thought provoking. Also, I've got to say in the chapter Good Girl, Tracy quotes from the following authors in this order. Claire Deidre, Deborah Levy, Ricky Lee Jones, Simone de Beauvoir, Agnes Varda, Anita Bruckner and Kim Adonizio. Right. So so she's very much in the Andy Miller zone of interest there so thank you very much Tracy Thorne so I'm just going to

read the opening bit of this book and the opening the main chapter the first chapter is called Boys Games Sydney 1988 a woman is in a TV studio being interviewed she's being interviewed because she's the drummer in a rock and roll band beside her sits one of the band's songwriters who used

to be her boyfriend he's wearing a necklace and lipstick the interviewer is a geeky looking guy in glasses with tinted hair the woman is a blonde in a t-shirt sitting with her legs apart, a short skirt pulled up between her thighs. The interviewer wants to talk about sexism and so most of the questions are to the woman because sexism is a problem for women to explain and define and answer for. We know this. Now Lindy, is there any difference do you think between men and women's ability to express emotion she starts to answer her face is serious polite then she smiles yes there's an enormous difference i think that women can express emotion by being hysterical and and the thing that's said to be most often within the band she looks up thinking hard, leg jiggling slightly, then looks to the songwriter, is to stop

being emotional, stop being angry, stop expressing it. Because I think we're encouraged as youngsters to cry and I don't think boys are allowed to and I think there's a secret language men have which is why you're all so much in power. She pulls back, takes hold of her hair and scrapes it into a ponytail, looking down and grinning widely. She seems placatory, but then suddenly her tone changes, becoming faintly angry. Turning again to the songwriter, she says to him in a louder, harsher voice, Robbie, are you going to let me talk? Are you going to play this game with him? Camera pulls back, so now the songwriter is in shot two and she is gesturing between him and the interviewer. Are you going to play this boys game?

She slaps her legs. OK, let's not be serious. Let's play boys games. Now. No, no. The interviewer interjects. But it's too late. She's reaching beneath her chair for something and she pulls out a water pistol and her voice is rising now. My God, I'm brilliant at boys games, she squirts. The interviewer has a hand up to protect himself and turns absolutely brilliant and she squirts the songwriter who also has a hand up. All three of them are smiling, but something has been unleashed very, very quickly. The atmosphere is electric and alert. All eyes on the woman and what she might do next. The audience applauds.

Cut. That's my rock and roll friend. So cool because Tracy proves that her friend can be rock and roll and more scary and more dangerous and more unsettling than anyone else in that book. So that's published by Canongate and it's out at the moment and it's brilliant. John, what have you been reading this week? Well, as promised, I am ready now to talk about the books of Jacob by Olga Togarczyk. We've been building up. Go on. Well, it's a 900-page novel of genius.

It does sort of live up to its billing. It's the book that won her the Nobel Prize for Literature. Is it where I would start with Olga Togarchuk? No, I wouldn't. I'd start with Flights or Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Yeah, yeah. So this is a historical novel set in 1750s Poland, which essentially might as well be medieval Poland

because one of the great movements in this book is from a kind of medieval worldview to a kind of Enlightenment worldview. And the story is about a real person called Jacob Frank who was, but believed himself to be the second coming. He was Jewish, believed himself to be the second coming, the Messiah, and started a cult. And so it's a book about belief and about, but it's also a book about science. One of the other main characters is a brilliant bibliophile called Father Chmielowski, who was a real person and wrote a book that Olga Togarczyk has written about before called The New Athens, which is a kind of Poland's first encyclopedia, an attempt to bring all the knowledge about the world into one place and to put it into a book.

So what is the book about? It's about everything. It's about the biggest possible questions? It's about everything. It's about the biggest possible questions. It's about belief. It's about God. It's about science. It's about... So what is it not like? It isn't like Tolstoy.

It's a bit like Dostoevsky in that there are lots, there are hundreds of characters in the book. She follows them all through. So you've got this, you have this extraordinarily, of characters in the book. She follows them all through. So you have this extraordinarily, unbelievably rich reconstruction of 18th century middle European life. And it's obviously also about Jews assimilating, becoming part of the European mainstream. There are pogroms, people are killed and tortured, but there is that idea of ideas transforming themselves, becoming part of a new reality. Was my attention kept all the way through the 900 pages?

Of course it wasn't. There were times when I was, you know, like anybody, I was, when my attention drifted. But was it worth, the final 100 pages are worth the effort? It's like all of these books. If I'd stopped, I know quite a lot of people who've stopped reading this book, and I would say you kind of don't get it until you get to the end.

The ending is magnificent, and she absolutely delivers on what she sets up. And I'm going to read you just a really little bit. So there's the whole point about it starts in Rojaten, which is in rural Poland. It's in a tiny little town where there's a big Jewish community, and it ends up in the grand avenues of Vienna. And there's not a lot of drama in that sense in the book.

The drama, insofar as it is, is the man a charlatan or not. And Jacob Frank kind of comes out of it as a charlatan. I mean, strangely, one of his particular party tricks is to get young women to suckle him. So he takes on... So there's a lot of weird sexual control. I think you've made it sound amazing. Here's the thing.

I heard a brilliant thing about Nixon in China last night. And it was saying that Chairman Mao, one of the librettists said what that is about. Because Chairman Mao comes out of that opera rather better than people would expect. And they said Chairman Mao is a warning about what happens if you get a philosopher as your king. And that's what Jacob Frank is like. You've got somebody who is incredibly charismatic, has deep religious kind of, you know, he's a scholar

as well as a kind of a charmer. And it really struck me that that's, yeah, unfortunately, we think that intellectuals would be exactly what we need to run the country, but this is 900 pages that will tell you maybe not. It's not a book to take on holiday if what you want is an entertaining light read. If you want to read and grapple with a great work of art, I'm afraid that's what it is. So it's The Books of

Jacob by Olga Togarchuk, translated brilliantly, miraculously by Jennifer Croft. One of the best translations I think I've read ever. And it will cost you 20 of your English pounds. The book chat will continue on the other side of this message. The book chat will continue on the other side of this message. Don't get carried away. If you think you're going to find drama, world tragedy and embryo and all that, just forget it. What it's about most of the time is education, drainage, foot and mouth disease. Same principles apply.

Get down accurately what goes on and make sure you spell the names right. Superb. Ah, it's taken me six years, but finally Roy Kinnear has appeared on Badminton. Ah, brilliant. That's from the 1974 TV adaptation of South Riding adapted by

Stan Barstow, author of Kind of Loving and other great northern texts. And I think most of us have watched this version, haven't we? I watched it because you recommended it to me, Una, and Tanya, you've seen it, haven't you? I think, John, you watched it. I did on YouTube, yeah. Absolutely loved it.

It's really good. 13 hours of VT, but tremendous for all that. Yeah, it puts the actors forward, doesn't it? And it doesn't cut some of the smaller stories about the Sordons and the Mitchells. You really spend some time with those characters.

And a proper Miss Siglesgate is so faithful. So, John, what book are we talking about? We're talking about South Riding by Winifred Holtby. And it was published in 1936. And as we said earlier, she died five months before it was published. Our former guest, Dr Matthew Sweet,

has described it as a Depression-era middlemarch. And I describe it as a feminist ragged trouser philanthropist. Both of those things. Both of those things, yeah. First of all, I love reading the novel. And second of all, I loved learning more about Winifred Holtby, actually, about whom I knew very little. It's an astonishing story, isn't it?

Amazing. Tanya, when did you... You wanted us to talk about this book. Yeah. When did you first read South Riding? Where were you doing? Where were you? What were you doing? So I first heard about it because I, when I was training to be a librarian, one of my fellow trainees was reading it and I asked her about it what it was about because I'd never heard of it and she said oh it's um it's about a local council and I thought this was absolutely

hilarious because I was a massive book snob having just done an English degree and yeah and it just kind of laughed and didn't think anything else of it and then fast forward about five years I was working at the British Library and I was doing an exhibition about the English or the British landscape in literature and I ended up putting South Riding in it so I read it for that and I got absolutely obsessed with it and partly because my previous great obsession Middlemarch I thought there's so there are so many similarities between them that I find really fascinating. So they've both got these kind of taglines.

So South Riding has an English landscape and Middlemarch has a study of provincial life. So I think those kind of complement each other. They both have eight parts. They're set exactly 100 years apart, so 1832, 1932. Oh, my God. That's true. Excellent.

They both involve coming up the railway to an area slash road. Well, yes, of course. And huge social change and also the way that all the characters are so interconnected of interconnected. So a tiny action of one character can have this huge kind of rippling effect in the community. I haven't found anywhere that Winifred Holtby has said, oh, I really love Middlemarch and I want to write a version of it for Yorkshire in the 1930s. But I can't see how she could have not had it in mind. I think one of the things about this novel is if you had to sum it up in one line or what Winifred Holby was trying to say,

it is that there is such a thing as society. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. That the private and personal and political cannot in fact be divided because they all influence one another and they in turn affect the life prospects of different members of your community and your society.

I love your comparison to Middlemarch there. I mean, my comparison to Ragged Trouser Philanthropies is nothing more than it's a load of bolshie propaganda that members of the Labour Party might disagree. Comparison to Ragged Trouser Philanthropist is nothing more than it's a load of bolshie propaganda. Members of the Labour Party might disagree. Una McCormack, tell people how much you've read to get ready for this episode. You are amazing. We called you Hurricane Una. Tell us. You see, I've had all her books stacked up and I've been working through them slowly. I read Poor Caroline and Mandur Mandah and I read Astonishing Island.

Yes. I read Land of Green Ginger. Yes, I read Land of Green Ginger. I watched both TV adaptations. I watched the film. Me too. I watched Testament of Youth, the 70s one. I really recommend that.

And I read, what else did I read? I read, oh, her book about women, Women in a Changing Civilisation. Oh, and Testament of Friendship. I had a read of that as well. Did you read the Virginia Woolf book? I'd read that before. Yeah.

And yet you have nothing to say about Winifred Holtby. I've got nothing. I've hit a dead end. What is Winifred Holtby to you? Because I remember you mentioning this to me years ago right yeah so when tanya came up with the idea for this episode i thought of you immediately because i could remember you saying if you ever do winifred holtby you know i'd love to be part of it i was doing a review of a book of uh it was a collection of articles from the Guardian Women's Page.

And it was actually, it was by Keira Cochran. It was recent journalism, but as is my wont, I went off and read around the subject. And I found a collection edited by Mary Stott, who'd been editor of that page till 1972. And she was, she'd reprinted that collection. She'd collected journalism from the the first half of the guardian movements page and the essays that stood out to me uh were the ones by winifred holtby and there were two in particular there was one about the need for a gender neutral personal pronoun and one about getting kicked out of a hotel uh after hours because uh she and her companion didn't have a gentleman friend with them.

And the voice just leapt off the page. It was vivid. It was smart. It was contemporary. It was sharp as nails. And from there, I went to, you know, most famous of South Riding. I went to picked up South Riding. Poof. It sort of blew my mind. I think there are two people in the world, two types of people, aren't there? The people who go, oh, my God, it's a book about local government. And then there are people who go, a book about local government? Clearly. I have seen both of those people.

If it was set in space, it would be like my perfect novel. It would be. Nigel Neill. Nigel neil's book of local government there is a science fiction novel by a whole based author concerned with the management of sewage at slow river by nicola griffiths so there is a kind of uh she mentions land of green ginger on the first uh page so there's a sort of so a book that and exactly what you were saying Tanya this proof or using the novel to say we are

connected if you sneeze there you kill someone there and if you kill someone there you ruin someone's life and it's just brilliant John what did you make of this novel or of Winifred Holtby's writing I absolutely loved this novel or of Winifred Holtby's writing?

I absolutely loved this novel. I'd always meant to read it because it was one of my grandmother's favourites up on the North East. And she more or less instructed me to read Testament of Youth and Testament of Friendship at a relatively young age. Those were books, those were kind of holy books for her. But I'd never read South Riding. I was aware, obviously, in 1974 when I was, whatever it was, 12, 11, of the TV show because it was watched religiously.

It was that Sunday night, whatever, serial. Yeah, I remember thinking at some point I must read it and see if it's as good as it seems to be. So it was this massive treat really to read it. I mean, I know it's a horrible, horrible cliche, but this is not a difficult book to read. I mean, given that I had quite another big fat book to read for this podcast as well.

I raced through South Riding, I can tell you. But also it's not just plot, is it? As we'll discuss, I'm sure. I think she's an astonishingly good writer. Lots of unresolved psychological stuff in this novel. I feel that she's, you know, this is a woman who knows she's dying. You feel that, I mean, that was a useful thing to know

because there are a couple of characters in the book who also know they're dying. And she writes about that with such tenderness and precision. Yeah, so it's marvellous is what I think. For anyone who's not read South Riding, who's slightly alarmed by the prospect of a novel about local government, don't worry. Here's the trailer from the most recent television adaptation of South Riding. And, you know, hang on to whatever it is you're sitting in at the moment adaptation of south riding and you know hang on to whatever it is you're sitting in at the moment i'm not sure you know what you're in for coming to

the south riding from london actually i do i was born here i thought she was very lively this is 1934 the future is going to be very different when she stirred things up a bit wouldn't she but do we want that? I want my girls to know that they can do anything. You're a remarkable woman. You've been disappointed in love during the queue. Bad things happen,

life goes on. Some places can change a person, but sometimes a person can change everything. Some people call this the last town in England, though we don't think so, of course.

Welcome to South Riding. Coming soon to BBC One and BBC One HD. Does it really have that music? Should get Nicky to play that again because frankly I couldn't keep up with everything that was happening. That's how gripping it is. The sheer drama.

Una, we're going to hear various clips through the show of adaptations of South Riding. Why do you think people keep going back to this novel? It was a hit when it was published. Yeah. It's been adapted for film and radio and television repeatedly. What's it got?

People are coming back to it to adapt it every sort of 40 years, aren't they? I think it, I mean, it has all these things that John says. It's got this sort of propulsive readability. It's got optimism. It's got a really sharp eye. I mean, she now at the final act of where this book is as a kind of first act. We're talking about a book that's written before the expansion of the welfare state, before the NHS. Yeah. And we're kind of just at the end of that now. It's talking about poverty. It's talking about the bankruptcy of the aristocracy. It's talking about corruption in politics, but it's also saying, but look, this is what we could do. This is what we could build. And what we see, and this book comes out before the war, we see that happen and then we see it collapse. So that's why I feel it's so

contemporary. It promises us something. It shows us how to do it. Yeah, promise. I think that's why I feel it's so contemporary. It promises us something. It shows us how to do it. Yeah, promise. I think that's very interesting. The idea that it still is a promise unfulfilled, so about autonomy and society, about the individual and the community. Tanya, what do you think? What is it about the book that speaks to people still? I felt like it was so contemporary and i

don't know if it was reading it at the moment because there's um was a measles epidemic in the book and some of the way that that gets talked about it really just felt like covid to me um like all the kind of same concerns about protecting your family there's um stuff about the role of the state and the size of the state there's stuff about uh the right of people to access education and birth control and like the women's right to choose and access to health care infant mortality council tax and the cost of living i just felt i feel like exactly like Una says, it's so now, but also of the 30s. And she's insisting, this thing that you were saying, insisting on our connectivity,

that if we talk about, oh, freedom from COVID, we're deluding ourselves, yeah? We're talking about, you know, the ability of a small number of people to seal themselves off and get their Amazon and Deliveroo delivered. And this isn't possible. This isn't how these things work.

But there's always a... We have the measles epidemic, but people pass things between... She says, we've got a choice. You can pass measles or you can pass around songs. People are humming songs that they pick up from concerts that they go to. So there's a sort of, you know, look, you can pass this around yourselves or choose not to, or you can spread joy. You can spread happiness.

You can build something positive and not destructive. It's a really clever book. I just want to read something. John talked about how reading the novel, knowing that she was so ill when she was writing it, kind of contextualised it in a way. Listeners might want to fast forward by about two minutes because the bit I'm about to read contains some heavy spoilers.

So go forward about two minutes. But our friend Peter Fifield, who is at Birkbeck, is the author of a book called Modernism and Physical Illness, Sick Books, which is terrific. It has essays on D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and Winifred Holtby. And the chapter on Winifred Holtby is entitled Winifred Holtby and the Fevered Middle Brow.

I just want to read the beginning of this because I think, John, you'll find this totally captivating. This is what Peter Fifield says about Winifred Holtby and South Riding. He says, Winifred Holtby's premature death from kidney failure is a prominent feature of her authorial image. Suffering from Bright's disease, she died at the age of 37 after an extended period of debilitation. An especially purple review of

the posthumous success South Riding tied the author's illness directly to her literary abilities. Quote, we cannot avoid remembering that all the time she was writing it, she must have known that it would be her last. The knowledge has not given it any twist or morbidity, but it has given it a sort of passionate richness of love, comprehension and compassion that is like the scent of dark red roses. To a similarly eulogistic end, Vera Britton keenly shaped her friend's image, notably with a memoir of their relationship, Testament and Friendship, published in 1940. This enshrines Holtby as a model of saint-like patience who wrote her masterpiece while enduring sickness with determination, selflessness and good cheer.

Britton writes that, quote, in one sense, she welcomed her last illness for the kinship that it gave her with other victims of pain. South Riding itself is well stocked with sickness. This is the spoiler, everybody. Go, miss this bit. Seeming to confirm its author's growing preoccupation amongst the novel's many afflicted characters Robert Kahn suffers from angina pectoris

Mrs Holly dies shortly after childbirth Gertie Holly dies of a relapse following a mastoid operation Lily Sorden dies of cancer Nell Huggins has rheumatism, Mr Brinsley has died of double pneumonia and Midge Khan is one of numerous children who catch measles. Oh and also Mildred Khan is incarcerated because of psychological illness. For Holtby physical illness is however a sustained interest that concludes rather than begins with South Riding and does considered and substantial imaginative work. Now, I thought that was brilliant. Thank you, Peter.

John, one doesn't read South Riding and feel like it's a litany of passings away. No, there's a sort of positivity that she has in her descriptions. I think maybe it's because she's brilliant at doing, although the bit I'll read later is a great example of this, of the landscape and the sense of just the cups and sauces and bread and butter and pints of beer, the bits and pieces of people's lives, kind of the comfort that people take, the small comfort.

Even you mentioned Lily Sorden, who's incredibly unwell through the whole book and martyrs herself by not telling anybody that she's unwell. But even that she manages somehow, there's an amazing sequence where she's obviously on opium and she's kind of just drifting. And it's kind of Keatsian in the way that she, people pass like shadows in a fog.

She had no contact with them. If she spoke, she could not remember what she said. So I think she, there's a, in the same way that she's politically very balanced, you know, she explains why it is, you know, the Labour Party don't get through to people who work on farms, you know, the Kahn's people who can't, you know, who are more harsh on people who they think are getting benefits than the Tory politicians. Anybody wanted to say, give me a novel which enshrines the best of democracy, both in terms of her vision as a novelist, but also in terms of her vision, as you said earlier, Andy, of society. It's Southriding.

But also artistic democracy, right, Una? Yeah, absolutely. She manages to tread a path between the modernism of Virginia Woolf, which she is tremendously familiar with, and the kind of Boots Lending Library middle-brow female novel, as it would have been popular. You know, this book is deliberately designed to be something of a Trojan horse, right?

The idea is it takes on the characteristics of the middle-brow novel of the era while being full of very subversive things. But it's really interesting that her mum didn't want it to be published because the character of Alderman Mrs Beddows is based on her mum, Alice Holtby. And Winifred died and Veraa britain was wanted to get

the book published and alice was really against it because she knew it was going to be embarrassing for her because uh winifred had used real things that happened in east riding um and i think alice holtby wrote something like oh i really wish that I could have made, could have edited it. So it would have been more like the story of the 1938 film, which is much more like a middle brow story, isn't it? Like it's got a kind of a happy ending. Yeah. Yeah. And ends with a kind of an affirmation of, you know, Britain together, presumably, you know, on the verge of war.

Yes. It ends in harmony. Yeah, but it would have been a much less good book. Oh yeah, Evans. Yeah, the Jubilee feels very relevant, doesn't it? Yeah.

The ambivalent view of Britain together. Well, I'm going to read a blurb in a minute but before, as you mentioned the 1938 film adaptation so the novel was a big success when it was published and and as a result of which they made a film quite quickly quite an important british film of its era in as much as it was a lot of it was filmed on location which is very unusual we've got a clip here this is you're going to hear edna best and ralph richards Richardson amongst others. This is a scene where our

heroine is being interviewed by the local town council for the job of headmistress at Are we ready for Miss Burton? Yes. Sit down, Miss Burton. Mr. Snape? Tell me, are you used to handling a large number of girls? Fairly. How many? About 740.

Oh, aye. Excuse me, Miss Burton. Do you use make-up? Certainly, when it's necessary. Oh, hi. Excuse me, Miss Burton. Do you use makeup? Certainly, when it's necessary. Oh, dear. Dear, dear, dear. I don't believe that a school mistress should look afront. I think it sets a bad example to the girls. Very sensible. Why do you want to come here when you've been teaching in London? I wanted to come back to Yorkshire. We had a much better vacancy at Flinton Bridge last year. Why didn't you apply for that? Because I didn't think that I would get it. Why not? Well, you see, I'm not by birth a lady. Oh, what do you mean you're not by birth a lady? My father was a blacksmith. What part of the riding do you come from? Lipton Hunter. My mother was the district

nurse. Oh, yes, I remember. Go on, say it. My father was a drunkard. He drank himself to death. My mother went to the West Riding and worked herself to the bone to educate me. I'm proud of my mother. If no one else has anything to ask... No, no, nothing. If you don't want to read this novel now,

what's wrong with you? Come on, it's brilliant. What's wrong with you? What was really interesting, watching all the adaptations back to back is that, as you probably heard, the 2011 one really leans into the romance and this film really leans into the local government. Yeah. So what about the subversion of the, Una,

what about the subversion of the sort of Heathcliff stereotype in this novel? That's really interesting, right? So you've got Robert Kahn, the landowner. Not Heathcliff so much as, who do I mean? Mr. Rochester. It's more a Mr. Rochester thing. Rochester, isn't it? A bit of Heathcliff.

There's the constant expectation of romance. Absolutely. Totally deferred, right? Completely deferred. Or not. What I find so weird about Khan is that Winifred Holtby describes him four times as looking like Mussolini.

Mussolini, yeah. I know, it leaps off the page, doesn't it? It's on this rabbit hole of like Googling young Mussolini, thinking, she keeps saying, oh, he was very handsome, looks a lot like Mussolini. I was like, in what way young Mussolini thinking because he keeps saying oh he was very handsome looks a lot like Mussolini I was like in what way is Mussolini very handsome it's like when you see that uh there's uh there was a biography of young Stalin and you would say oh my god yeah Mussolini no yeah but Khan you're right he's set up as this sort of Russian I mean there's a there's a scene with him on a horse as well, isn't there?

Yeah. Yeah. Bumps into him on the horse. He's kind of brooding. He's he's got the unhappy first marriage. You're expecting, of course, that the first wife will will do the decent thing and, you know, die in a fire or something. But that doesn't that doesn't happen at all but khan i think he's he's sort of set up as the antagonist you know he's the gentry he's the landowner but even then i think holtby is saying he's not the villain here and uh it's uh sedgemeyer yeah it's marrying into the aristocracy that that drains him dry that this vampiric, sort of extremely rich. And there's a lovely... Isn't there a moment where they're at a poor relief committee or something

and it's Khan who has the common touch? Yeah. And I think Astell is sort of envious of it. Khan, she seems to me to be saying that Khan is a man out of time. Yeah. That he doesn't fit, but that's not to say he's not a human being and not to say that his values are without merit.

The values of community, mutuality, reliance on each other. It's just a feudal. It's feudal. Yeah, he cares for his feudal charges. But she says it can't be real love because you need equality. Tanya, I'm going to ask you to read something in a minute, but first I'm going to read the original jacket copy for South Riding, published by Collins in 1936.

Is it 36? Yeah. South Riding by Winifred Holtby South Riding is unquestionably John, I'm just going to say to John listen to this, would you put this on a jacket John? South Riding is unquestionably the greatest novel we have been privileged to publish

Wow Collins screw the rest of our authors this is the one completed just before she died it shows Winifred Holtby at the full height of her remarkable powers and brings home even more forcibly how great

a loss current literature has suffered South Riding is a story of Yorkshire life, it centres around a county council and as Winifred Holtby herself wrote, quote, the effect of bylaws and resolutions on the lives of people like haulage contractors, corn dealers and small town drapers. It is full of hunting and agricultural shows and relieving officers and drainage schemes and all the things that make up country life.

Put it in my veins. Those who are already familiar with, quote, the administrative country of York, the local government of which forms an unobtrusive background to the story, know that the South Riding is in fact non-existent. That this romantic region has been historically omitted from an area divided into North, East

and West. The industrial smoke-blackened West Riding of Phyllis Bentley's novels forms no part of Winifred Holtby's English landscape. The North and the East Ridings have lent their crashing seas, their sweeping wolds, to give sound and colour to this gracious and compassionate story. Once again, if you're listening to this and you don't want to immediately read South Riding, there is something wrong with you.

Something is wrong with you. wrong with you didn't she find didn't she find that she found all the sort of papers in her mother's waste paper of all the of all the council minutes her mother had to resign her grieving mother had to resign from the council yeah the whole story about the um this so there's like a kind of a fraud plot uh with buying land to defraud the council from money. Yeah. That was all based on a real story where someone committed suicide. So it's like properly serious scandal. What I love about Winifred Holtby, I've got to say, actually,

funnily enough, is she takes no shit. Right. If you read her other work, her journalism and her short stories, actually her voice is remarkably flexible in terms of what she can turn her hand to and the extent to which she pursues an idea that she feels is true. And that adds to the sense of South riding as a Trojan horse, I think. I think I learned a lot by reading other things by her

about how capable she was of doing all sorts of other things, rather than then turning her hand to, quote unquote, a middle-brow novel, which requires its own set of skills. But it's a very clear artistic, political, social, commercial, philosophical decision. Tanya, I wonder whether could you read us something to give us a little bit of a sense of how she goes about it? Yes, I'm going to read a bit from the epilogue to the book, which is set in the Jubilee of 1935. And this is Sarah Burton, the headmistress, talking to her pupils. And do we think Sarah Burton, just for the people, talking to her pupils. And do we think Sarah Burton, just for the people who haven't read the book, we do think Sarah Burton and author Winifred Holtby have a few things in common, don't we?

Yeah, so Sarah Burton's like the socialist feminist character in the novel. Here's a very set idea about what reform reform needs to be she says she's a member of the labour party um she's opposed to khan and that he's kind of all about the feudalistic past and she wants a kind of a a new future um and this is what she says to her students don't let me catch any of you at any time loving anything without asking questions. Question everything, even what I'm saying now, especially perhaps what I say. Question everyone in authority and see that you get sensible answers to your questions. Then if the answers are sensible, obey the orders without protest. Question your government's policy,

question the arms race. Question the Kingsport slums and the economies over feeding school children and the rule that makes women have to renounce their jobs on marriage and why the derelict areas still are derelict. This is a great country and we are proud of it and it means much that is most lovable. But questioning does not mean the end of loving and loving does not mean the abnegation of

intelligence. Bow as much love to your country as you like, serve to the death if that is necessary. She was thinking of Joe Astle killing himself by overworking the Clydeside, dying for his country more surely than thousands of those who today waved flags and cheered for royalty but i implore you do not forget to question lead on girls yes so great lead on girls like the leaving school speech you all want um miss jean brody also a great fan of mussolini lest we forget yes i was going to say that the Mussolini thing was big in the 30s before it all went wrong. I would like to ask Una and John, there's also a kind of brilliant social survey element to this novel,

which I do not think was very common in the 1930s. Certainly not with the compassion and democratic approach that winifred holtby shows i think she can she conceived of the book as a social comedy i think that's that's what she had in it that's what i feel when you i'm i'm struck by when you read the brilliant little chapter headings you know know, Midge enjoys the measles, the Hubbard's only object is philanthropy, Mrs Beddoe's has three men to think of. Barney Holly blows out a candle.

Yes. Nat Brimsley does not like rabbit pie. I think what you've got really is, you know, she wants to write a comedy, but she's writing a comedy as she's dying. And I think that kind of sense of wanting the book to have a deeper resonance, you can feel her allowing the characters to move. But having said that, when she does do comedy, she does do it very well.

And there is a brilliant scene where um the widow mrs brimsley the widow and the somewhat feckless mr holly whose wife has died in childbirth or shortly after childbirth and he has is it seven children a lot of children and but he is a charmer and he's got amazing sings a beautiful tenor singing voice and it's one of the more amusing seduction scenes in in literature i think when they're they're thrown together they're thrown together in in the bus i'll just read a little bit of it anyway you're the salt of the earth and don't i know it he sighed that sheltering impersonal arm around her waist tightening.

A fat lot of you, to me, that is, stuck away in Cold Harbour with one son that wouldn't know spring chicken from a black pudding and another that knows all right but would rather have cocoa and jam and peg pudsy than bone turkey and bacon cakes and his poor old mother. As for Bill Heyer, he's as nice a chap as you could wish, but he's not human.

There's something about a bachelor as neat in the house as he is that isn't natural, I say. He might as well have been a girl. That's right, it's not natural, though maybe if he had two arms instead of one they'd be tickling to get round you. With ladylike oblivion, Mrs Brimsley ignored altogether the arm which was already around her waist, so preoccupied with the two on their front seat that they did not notice how the bus moved now more quickly, now slowly at foot pace in the enveloping fog. They had even forgotten there was a fog at all when a violent jolt suddenly threw Mrs Brimsley right into her escort's arms

and him onto his knees beneath her, gallantly shielding her from further shock. Two children screamed, the setter yelped, a basket of live chickens flew from the rack and landed on an old gentleman's bowler hat. The conductor called, Oops-a-daisy, keep on smiling, keep on shining. But the left four-wheel of the South Riding

Motor Service's bus was in a ditch. Oh God! Oh God! gasped Mrs Brimsley. That's all right, that's all right, muttered Mr Holly, his mouth full of her hair. Her hat had fallen off and she lay draped across his head and shoulders in an attitude not unlike that known as the fireman's lift.

She had lost her fur, she'd lost her paper carrier of tomatoes, tea, heather mixture, knitting yam and zambuck. She had lost her nerve completely. But Mr. Holly's arms were round her, and Mr. Holly's chest, as he struggled up and levered her back onto the now sloping seat, seemed a pleasant and comfortable place on which to have hysterics.

So Mrs. Brimsley, an energetic woman with courage enough to face life's real crises without faltering, abandoned herself to the luxury of this lesser occasion and laughed and cried in unashamed abandon. Oh, it's brilliant. Very good. Rhythm, though. Rhythm. Yeah. unashamed abandon oh it's oh very good rhythm though rhythm yeah right like all comic writing listen to the rhythm of that bang bang bang bang bang i i'll go into spoilers here because i do i do want to talk a little bit about barney holly who i think is is the sort of if there is a villain in this book it's probably him he just goes through this book with the kind of casual abandon of a of a which in a posher man would be boris johnson yeah he just uh lives without consequence he's quite literally

shameless yeah he lives without consequence and then i think it's it's it's not even the death of his wife and the fact that this consigns his eldest daughter, who's a clever girl, consigns her to a life of drudgery, sort of gets him to pull his bloody finger out. It's the death of the little girl, isn't it? And the way he sort of sorts out his mess is by seducing Jesse Brimsley on the bus. on the bus. He's sort of, he's a brilliant, he's a brilliant example of a man who thinks he's a lovable rogue, who she presents as an unlovable one.

He's a rogue. Really, really good. And the other brilliant thing about this scene is it's immediately juxtaposed with a scene between Khan and Burton, Sarah Burton, in the Manchester Hotel, which is a disastrous encounter between potential lovers. Spoilers. Spoilers.

Oh, it doesn't make any difference. Read the book anyway. I was going to say, the other thing about Holly, the thing that I find really depressing is that basically his wife dies in childbirth because lydia their daughter makes them a cup of tea yeah and that like revives him enough to want to have sex with his wife he's not supposed to have any more children and so and the mum tells lydia it's like you shouldn't have made us that cup of tea if you don't made that cup of tea lydia you could have taken up that scholarship

my god yeah the other utterly ruthless character I think we have to mention is Midge, Midge Kahn, who I find quite really, really cold actually. Oh, she's horrible. That scene at the end where she just, so there's an article in Harper's from 1941 called Who Goes Nazi? And you look at Midge Khan and you think my god you're gonna be you're the unity mitford of this book aren't you brilliant well let's hear another little bit from an adaptation this is from an american radio adaptation from 1948 and what you're going to hear is Hester Sondergaard as Sarah Burton,

who has just helped Robert Kahn deliver a calf in the middle of the night. Oh, great scene. And they've repaired to his house to talk through the night they've had. And you're going to hear Robert Kahn here, played by none other than Charles Lawton. You know, this room is beautiful. Aye, it has dignity in the half-light of the fire and the candle flame. It's not so pretty of a day.

This big house is crumbling to pieces over my head. That portrait over the mantle, her eyes. She was the loveliest woman I have ever known. I loved her from our first meeting. Her beauty and her courage and her laughter, you know. But I never really understood her. She was always a stranger to me. She was like some wild thing, reckless and enchanted.

She roared like the wind and danced and went her own way, but first it was travel. Biarritz, Monte Carlo, Baden-Baden, Vienna. We lived extravagantly, hunting all winter, fishing sometimes in Norway. I could afford it in those days, and I was happy. But when Midge was born, all that changed. Muriel lost her balance, poor beauty. And since then, she's been shut away. I blame myself she didn't want the child. Oh, I'm terrible. Perhaps she never even loved me. I don't know. I shall never know. But I loved her, and that was enough. Since then, I've mortgaged Maythorpe, stinted my daughter's education, drained the farm to the last penny,

let the house go to rack and ruin to see that she has every luxury of treatment and comfort that money can buy. Oh, she, uh, she isn't beautiful now. After 14 years. I won't fail her, though, if I have to sacrifice everything. Oh man.

Wow. That whole scene is completely out of character for him as well. He would never say all of that. Just suddenly emoting there in front of a portrait. Right, so it's an adaptation that condenses the 500 page South Riding to

one hour of drama old hour not 13 hours like yorkshire tv or three hours like the bbc but a whole hour is devoted to it i wonder could we talk a little bit about some of uh winifred holtby's other work before we we have to wind up. Una, is there a typical Winifred Holtby book? Oh, that's a really interesting question. No, I mean, it would be South Riding, but only because I think in South Riding, that's the book where she's at the top of her game, I think. It was funny, there was something on Twitter the other day about,

has anyone written their masterpiece before the age of 35? And I think you do see kind of, you do see run-ups for this. So there's a great comic novel called Poor Caroline, which is about a woman trying to clean up the British film industry and a bunch of crooks and swindlers sort of circulate around her and try to get her money out of her and that bunch of crooks and swindlers sort of circulate around her and try to get her money out of her and that sort of thing. Mandoa Mandoa is another comedy about colonialism. It's very like Black Mischief. I think they're published more or less at the same time,

but it's not cynical. I've only read two of her other novels. I've read Land of Green Ginger and The Crowded Street. And I just felt like they were, like you could see hints of South Riding but they were very different in that I feel like they are much more like traditional middle brow there's kind of melodramatic aspects there's like a little kind of Mary Webb type style element in there um and you there's no melodrama in South Riding it's it's just so beautiful and unsentimental and well-observed. I think this is the book where the journalism and the novels come together. I think it's typical to kind of think of Holtby as maybe,

you know, she's pulled one way by the journalism, she's pulled one way by the novels, but I don't think that's the way to think about it. These were always powering what she did. The journalism is sharp, has the eye for, you know, that detail that will feed into a scene like that, comedy on the bus. Her ability to juxtapose scenes in the way that we talked about. You just wonder what she would have done next.

What would have been the book after South Riding, I think, because all that apprenticeship just turned out this masterpiece. It's incredibly inspirational in that even though, so Astor, who's the kind of the big socialist character, doesn't kind of achieve what he wants to achieve in the South Riding or just in life. to achieve in the self-riding or just in life but he writes to Sarah and says I I think um even if there's another war and what you've built up doesn't come to fruition you've still done really good work and that really I'm going back to middle march again so the last the last line of middle march is like my self-help book um which is basically saying the world is the world gets better because people are doing small good things that are within their remits and it won't be remembered but it makes everything better for all of us and I just think that's it's so it's so great. Yes, indeed.

Well, listen, before we wind up, last week I read Winifred Holtby's book, The Astonishing Island, which no one had borrowed from the library for 30 years. It's never been republished. And Una McCormack, you read this as well, didn't you? I did. I've got my own copy now, but I booked a special trip to Newnham College Library

to read the copy. I sat there in the library there and read it. And as my extra deep dive into Winifred Holby, I thought I'm going to do this. I'd just like to read this one bit from near the beginning. This is a satirical novel in the kind of tradition of HG Wells. And regular listeners will will hear me rolling my eyes as I say this. Wells and regular listeners will will hear me rolling my eyes as I say this Patrick Hamilton's impromptu in Moribundia where you wouldn't expect this author to write this kind of book but it's really funny isn't it Una it's genuinely funny some proper laughs in this and in terms of so

the idea is it's about a man called Robinson Lipping Tree McIntosh in the tradition of Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver, who lands on an astonishing island, which may well be the United Kingdom. He's washed up on a beach and this is what he finds. Those not occupied with papers in some form were supervising the labour of young children who were employed at digging trenches and mounds, and irrigating the sand, etc. And I thought at first that these people must be mad to employ child labour to till the land where no crops grow, but I learned afterwards that it is the nature of the islanders to mimic labour for pleasure, as I shall presently explain. Directly I struggled to the shore, being almost exhausted.

A man laid his hand upon me and led me into a large building where I thought he would offer me food and shelter, so went gladly. But he shouted, islanders to the right, foreigners to the left, have you anything to declare? Any perfume, cigarettes, matches, artificial silk, optical instruments, tomatoes, motor cars, imported grapes or copies of the well of loneliness. And I said, no, I said, no, I had nothing but my trousers, which were wet through having used my shirt as a sail.

And he said, you can't sunbathe here. And I said, I see I can't. There's no sun. And I explained that I was shipwrecked and I told him that I was not the only shipwrecked wretch landed from the storm for I had seen five or six unhappy women one with a small child and one of venerable appearance who crawled half naked and blew with cold from the waves just after me yet not one islander went to help them or show compassion for their terrible plight, and when I pointed out to the man who had so strangely questioned me about motor cars and

imported grapes, he said, help them? Oh no, we can't interfere with the ladies nowadays, not that I approve of mixed bathing myself. And indeed, I soon learned that this was no accident, but that the women had removed their warm clothes and entered of their own free will into the water, cutting their feet upon the shingle and suffering agonies from cold and misery in order to give themselves pleasure. And yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is Winifred Holtby

on the topic of wild swimming there, Nicky. So still satirical and still valid and totally not in print, The Astonishing Island. But I really, really enjoyed that. And now we must leave the sea cliffs and the rolling farmland of the South Riding behind us and offer huge thanks to Tanya and to Una for allowing us to roam freely across this wonderful novel, to Nicky Birch for braiding a single story out of our four voices

and to Unbound for all the bacon cake. You can download all 157 previous episodes of Batlisted many of which feature Una McCormack plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at batlisted.fm and we're always pleased if you

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than the price of a round of bass and the nag's head, lock listeners get two extra lock-listeds a month, our own cosy staff room where we three sit drawing up lesson plans for listeners and assigning marks to the things we've seen, heard and read in the previous fortnight. Lot listeners also get to hear their names read out on the show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation. And this week's batch roll call is... Pat Carey, thank you very much. Paul Navison, to Edwina Lana, to Joe Carter, to Hannah James,

to Patricia Amort, and to Mike Allen. We're also delighted to welcome Fleur Ashworth and Sarah Chapman to our Guild of Master Storytellers, the highest tier in the backlisted firmament. Hey, listeners, if you're in London on May the 9th this year, 2022, you can come and see me and my band shabby road at the hundred club raising money for the national literacy trust by playing songs from the blue album by the beatles sort of 67 to 1969 and 70 we've been rehearsing really hard and we can almost play them without looking at the music now so so so given that the Beatles no longer exist Shabby Road does exist and you can get tickets for the gig at we got

tickets.com forward slash event forward slash 537443 all the money we make will go to the National Literacy Trust and last time we managed to raise 10 000 pounds and we're hoping to do better than that this time so uh come along it's charity let's be honest it's a false flag operation the charity to allow me to tit about on stage singing beatle songs but nevertheless more children will learn to read as a result of us doing it. So support it. Win-win. Got to be. As we've said repeatedly in this episode, you know, there are two types of people in this world.

People who want to read South Riding and fools. That's right. So we hope you enjoy it because nobody who listens to this would fall into the latter category. Right, Johnny? Yes, completely right. In the words of Sarah Burton, if the law is oppressive, we must change the law. If tradition is obstructive, we must break tradition.

If the system is unjust, we must reform the system. Take what you want, says God. Take it and pay for it. Thanks, Tanya. Thanks, Suna. This has been brilliant. Thank you. See you.

Bye-bye. Bye. I took a good look at myself, realized that I was 39 years old. But I'm not going to stagnate up there, no fear. There'll be far too much to do. I'm a fighter and I love teaching. I don't think you've ever understood just how much. I think I'm born to be a spinster.

And if that's the case, then by God, I'm going to spin. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.