How long does it take to read South Riding?
Winifred Holtby
South Riding by Winifred Holtby takes about 9 hours 21 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 9 hours 21 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1936. 510 pages, about 140,250 words.
19 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 15 hours 35 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 9 hours 21 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 51 minutes |
The page count is the median across 14 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
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.
Subjects: Fiction, Fiction, general, England, fiction
