Literary Yorkshire

Windswept moors, idyllic hills, iconic ruins, stormy sea sides, industrial wastelands of slag heaps and pitheads – all Yorkshire and all written about by a great number of authors who hail from the largest region in England.

In her 1941 study, The "English Regional Novel", Phyllis Bentley saw a trend of Yorkshire authors emerging. This trend has continued and Yorkshire has proven to be extremely rich in literary texts. As David Hey writes, Yorkshire’s identity “is still recognised by its own people and by outsiders”. Yorkshire has been a perfect field for a case study of regional fiction.

"Literary Yorkshire" is an exploration of novels set in and about Yorkshire. It takes the reader on an excursion from the romantic Brontë landscapes, via the rise of the industrial age, through the rural idyll of James Herriot, and the disillusioned wastelands that were home to the angry young men to the Yorkshire of today. This case study employs the methods of genre study in combination with Phyllis Bentley’s work on regional novels and Barbara Piatti’s literary geography in order to establish the generic repertoire of the Yorkshire novel, which might very well have been the first English regional novel.