'Bucolic Mussolini': Sexual Politics in Winifred Holtby's South Riding

Through a Woolfian approach to sexual politics, an engagement with the genre of romance, and a fascination with heterosexuality as an institution, South Riding (1936) encouraged its readers to first experience, and then resist, fascism’s antirational seductive power. This stance was offered not as a radical, heroic gesture, but as path towards a possible feminist future, marked by loss but not devoid of humour.

Drawing on original archival findings to make its case, this article builds on recent feminist scholarship on interwar British literature. It develops its method from sexuality studies theorists, especially Clare Hemmings, Lauren Berlant and Andrea Long Chu, who have engaged with Kate Millett’s notion of sexual politics and, more widely, with the classic second-wave feminist idea that the personal is political.

This theoretical framework moves the current critical conversation in two directions: it enables us to assess the key role played by Woolf’s ‘steady and amused comprehension’ of sex in the novel (as Holtby herself put it), and it demonstrates how a conviction in the democratic potential of romance underpinned Holtby’s commitment to social realism as an anti-fascist form.

Bringing together archival research and feminist theory, the article shows how South Riding contested the ‘the orthodox “great divide” narrative of the literary culture of the period’ (Periyan and Jones, 2020).