Written as she lay dying, South Riding was Holtby's masterpiece. Edited by her close friend, Vera Brittain and published posthumously in 1936. The book was an instant success. It is a melodrama set in Yorkshire and features a small area dealing with the manifold challenges of the interwar period. At the centre of the story is an unlikely romance that develops between Robert Carn and Sarah Burton. His traditional ways and her bright, progressive ideas seem an odd match but the two soon grow close. But tragedy intervenes, he is not free to love and she, for all her education, doesn't understand the ways of South Riding.