Winifred Holtby: A BBC Radio Collection

Winifred Holtby was an acclaimed novelist, journalist, feminist and social reformer. Her work encompasses six novels, two short story collections, a play and the first critical study of Virginia Woolf, but she is best known for her posthumously published masterpiece South Riding, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Award.  

Born into a Yorkshire farming family, Holtby set much of her fiction in the landscape of her youth, including the three novels in this collection. Adapted as a 15-part radio drama, South Riding follows the lives and loves of fiery young headmistress Sarah Burton, landowner and school governor Robert Carne, and alderwoman Mrs Beddowes.

Anderby Wold tells the tale of a farmer's wife, a radical young writer and a village rocked by social change.

And set in the years leading up to World War I, The Crowded Street centres around a woman's journey from introspective teenager to self-fulfilled adult.