Original green cloth, spine lettered in purple and a little faded at tips, top edge green largely faded, a few smalls spots to edges and foxing to preliminary pages, lower edge roughtrimmed, faint partial browning to free endpapers and a few faint spots. In the case of Miss Sarah Barton, the Council’s action changed the entire shape and color of a life. Au final, un livre riche, offrant tout le panorama d'une époque au coeur d'un village (fictif, certes) du Yorkshire. The dust jacket is poor with chips to the corners and spine ends, darkening to the spine, light overall soiling. The dry as dust subject of council meetings brings to life the impact decisions have on individual lives, from making improvements to the local secondary school to where to build a new road or a new hospital.

Holtby is best known for this work, and for her lifelong friendship with the prominent diarist Vera Brittain, who edited this work. Robert Carne of Maythorpe Hall stands for everything Sarah despises: his family has farmed the South Riding for generations, their position uncontested. This is the story of a multitude of characters, flawed and imperfect as may be' yet with an undeniable charm.Beddows: as the South Riding's first female alderman, she's expected to be colorful and allows people to believe outlandish stories about her, but in reality she's more conventional than that, a worldly-wise grandmother who finds happiness through community involvement--and through the attention of Robert Carne, whom she views as a combination of attractive male friend and spiritual son-in-law. There are a large number of significant characters and the main characters don’t appear in large portions of the novel. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. Persephone Books scored a notable success in 2008 with its reissue of The Crowded Street, in which the heroine Muriel Hammond rejects her life as a provincial wallflower for "an idea of service – not just vague and sentimental, but translated into quite practical things". The book was first published in the UK in February, 1936, and was rapidly reprinted as the book became a bestseller.

A robust copy of the special edition of Holtby's sprawling mistresspiece of provincial life, and government, in changing times.Add to this an enormous cast of characters from all walks of life, all the intrigues of local Government, an abortive bedroom scene where ‘Rochester’ has a heart attack and nearly dies before anything can actually HAPPEN - and the heroine had even put on the silk underwear she had bought earlier that day as a Christmas present for her sister - which did not even get a viewing - ! The prize established in Holtby's name by the Royal Society of Literature in 1967 and funded by Brittain, was abolished in 2003, despite the society's promise to Brittain that it would perpetuate Holtby's memory. Holtby was an influential feminist, a member of the equal rights Six Point Group and a director of its parallel publication Time and Tide; she was a committed speaker for the League of Nations Union, lecturing on collective security in international relations; and most remarkably, she was a pioneer in the development of black trade unionism in South Africa, a country she first visited in 1926, and whose fortunes continued to mark her for the rest of her life. 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.