Land of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby

Land of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby published 1927 [excerpt] Lorna Lavine, turning to greet the little secretary of a Kingsport Nursing Home, saw instead a tall, magnificent young woman in a flamboyant dress of black and gold, cut far too low (the scissors had slipped at the last moment), about her splendid back and shoulders. Joanna’s eager vitality dimmed that evening her husband’s delicate charm. With lips slightly parted and bright, glowing cheeks, she seemed to be a little breathless, a little defiant, brazen in her determination to snatch from fortune one golden hour. comments: My, but Land of Green Ginger is a depressing book. This brief moment of success at a dinner party would give you a completely false impression of the rest of the book. I love Holtby’s South Riding, a proper saga of a book, a sweeping look at a community, with sadness and happiness, success and failure. This earlier novel – not so sweeping. Green Ginger has a quite usual kind of opening – quick…