Winifred Holtby (1898 – 1935) wrote a total of seven novels and was also a prolific journalist who often wrote about the cinema. She died aged 37 from kidney disease and South Riding was published posthumously in 1936.

In the extract below, middle-aged Lily Sawdon is suffering with a terminal illness but hasn’t told her pub landlord husband, Tom. She travels from the Yorkshire countryside to a ‘super-cinema’ in Kingsport (based on Hull). After tea and hot toast (‘dripping with butter’) in the luxurious cinema tea-room, she watches Greta Garbo as the doomed wartime spy in Mata Hari.

Later in the novel, Mrs. Brimsley ‘a formidable woman in maroon plush hat, bear stole and cotton gloves’ goes on her own to the pictures in Kiplington. She ‘sat through the news reel, all sport and soldiers, the comic, all American slang that she could not understand, and the big romance, which brought tears to her eyes….

She looked at the languishing lady on the screen and saw sinuous movements, hips slim as a whiting’s, wet dark lips and lashes luxuriant as goose-grass in a hedge bottom.‘