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National Provincial
National Provincial (first published in 1938) is first and foremost ‘a social-political novel, a sprawling panorama of West Riding life and politics in the mid 1930s’ (Rachel Reeves, MP for Leeds West in her Preface); the feminist plea is made almost obliquely because the author takes feminism for granted: it is thus a subtle feminism. It begins with an enticing description of Mary’s arrival home, her difficulties with her invalid mother and then her re-entry into local life. Just like Mrs Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters and Winifred Holtby’s South Riding, published in 1936, the novel evokes Yorkshire life in all its facets, as well as the everyday experience of a young woman living there.
630 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1938
12 people are currently reading
195 people want to read
About the author
Lettice Cooper
36 books21 followersLettice Ulpha Cooper began to write stories when she was seven. She studied Classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford graduating in 1918.
She returned home after Oxford to work for her family's engineering firm and wrote her first novel, 'The Lighted Room' in 1925. She spent a year as associate edtior at 'Time and Tide' and during the Second World War worked for the Ministry of Food's public relations division. Between 1947 and 1957 she was fiction reviewer for the Yorkshire Post. She was one of the founders of the Writers' Action Group along with Brigid Brophy, Maureen Duffy, Francis King and Michael Levy and received an OBE for her work in achieving Public Lending Rights. In 1987 at the age of ninety she was awarded the Freedom of the City of Leeds.
She never married and died in Coltishall, Norfolk at the age of 96.
From Wikipedia
She returned home after Oxford to work for her family's engineering firm and wrote her first novel, 'The Lighted Room' in 1925. She spent a year as associate edtior at 'Time and Tide' and during the Second World War worked for the Ministry of Food's public relations division. Between 1947 and 1957 she was fiction reviewer for the Yorkshire Post. She was one of the founders of the Writers' Action Group along with Brigid Brophy, Maureen Duffy, Francis King and Michael Levy and received an OBE for her work in achieving Public Lending Rights. In 1987 at the age of ninety she was awarded the Freedom of the City of Leeds.
She never married and died in Coltishall, Norfolk at the age of 96.
From Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
June 21, 2023
Quick-take review: 4.5 stars rounded up. This is such an engaging book! It feels like a North and South for 1930s England. I love that the politics in this book don’t overshadow the characters. The positive in this book with its many fascinating and well developed characters is also its shadow side. I wanted more time and more development with many characters and there just wasn’t enough time! And this is an over 500 page book! But the main characters are beloved, and I’m so happy to add them to the character “cloud of witnesses” if you will in my brain. Will be writing more soon!
Long-form review: National Provincial is set in Aire in 1935-36, which is a northern English town (a fictionalized Leeds). The story begins with twenty-seven-year old Mary Welburn returning to her native Aire from London. Mary attended Oxford on a scholarship and is a newspaper reporter, first in London and now in Aire. Though Mary doesn't get a ton of page time, she is one of the characters at the heart of the novel. Mary is returning to Aire because her sister, Doris, is getting married and someone needs to look after their invalid mother and teenage brother. Mary's father abandoned the family when the children were young and her mother is an emotionally closed woman. Mary was and is loved and encouraged by her maternal aunt and uncle Grace and John Allworthy. The Allworthys are also at the heart of the novel.
The Allworthys are a childless couple in their 60s who have worked tirelessly for the Labour movement over the past 50 years. (My English history and politics may get a bit shaky here, so bear with me! I've learned it all by osmosis with novels.) John and Grace were both raised in poverty. John was a major player in local strikes and helped to form a Union to represent the workers in Aire. By this point in his life, the Union is functioning well and has real power in the marketplace in Aire. John himself has served many years on the town council and is a well known, well respected, and even a beloved figure in town. Grace is equally well known and loved. John works at a ready-made clothing factory owned by a man named Ward. John feels the mellowing that comes with age and has to consider what his role is in politics in this new phase of his life.
John and Ward (I can't remember his first name!) grew up together in the slums of Aire, and Ward is now an immensely rich man with a big factory, many employees, and a lot of power in the community. He has a wife and two children who are just barely adults, Marjorie and Leslie (a boy). The Wards are financial equals with Aire's old families, but they're only tolerated in the social scene in town. It's the old new money v. old money conflict. Ward's children are in a tough spot because of this. They are educated according to the ideals of the upper class at the time, but they only really fit in amongst other new money families. Leslie is a particularly sensitive young man who both respects and is scared of his father. Ward Senior is a distant and austere parent and it has created emotional havoc for his son. This family plays a major role in the story, but they're not at the heart of it in the same way Mary, the Allworthys, and the Hardings are.
One of the reigning gentry and Tory (conservative) families in Aire is the Harding family. Lionel and his wife and their surviving adult children, Robert and Stephen, both married and in their 30s, and Clare, in her 20s. The Hardings' third son Neville was killed in the Great War and his family still mourns his loss, especially Lionel and Clare. Both Stephen and Robert play major roles in the story, though Robert more so in the final fourth of the novel. Lionel has served on the town council with John in the past, so he knows and respects the Allworthys. Though Lionel is a conservative, he is wonderfully even-tempered and broad-minded. He is observant and intelligent and is not afraid of emotions or conflict.
Stephen is another heart character. He is the equivalent of a kind of HR manager at Ward's factory. He is married to Joy and has two young boys. Joy comes from a landed gentry family and is beautiful, but has retained a kind of schoolgirl mentality to the world. To Joy, the class system should remain firmly in place and her class can do no wrong. As Stephen comes into contact with Mary Welburn and the Allworthys, he begins to have his eyes opened to the world outside his comfortably insular class and political bubble. He begins to move to the left, politically, and this causes fissures in the lives of many characters.
There are many, many other characters who are all written beautifully and realistically. Lettice Cooper relentlessly explores every type of person in this novel. There is the slum-raised, social climbing snob Olive who works at Ward's. There is the young man Tom Sutton, a gifted orphan who thinks of John and Grace as his uncle and aunt and leads a strike against Ward and against the Union and runs for city council. There is Rosie, Robert and Beryl's maid-of-all-work, who is vulgar (or so some characters think) and goodhearted. There are two young-ish, middle class couples, the Grants and Unwins, who work at the university and have influence on Leslie Ward (for good and for ill). There is Harold Pearson, who is a Communist. And ever so many more...
The veneer of the novel is the fraught political situation at this point in English history. The questions are exacerbated by the intensity of political movements overseas in Germany and Russia and the steady march towards war, though there are only whispers of it in the novel. Lettice Cooper was writing this in the time the novel was set, so it's fascinatingly free of any hindsight from WWII or beyond. For the most part, Cooper writes her characters with complexity and nuance. The young hotheads like Tom can be endearing at times. John Allworthy struggles with hatred towards a man. I can symphathize with Olive who just wants to have nice things around her and nice clothes after growing up poor.
The characters who are at the heart of the novel--Stephen, Mary, Lionel, John, and Grace--are there because they have high emotional intelligence and don't see the world through a strict right/wrong lense. They are each passionate and opinionated, but have a humble courage that frees them from snobbery, allows them to befriend others who are different, and hold their own opinions loosely. There is a steadiness to each of them, a salt of the earth quality. I loved reading about them and cheered whenever they came on the page! These characters have a wisdom to share for our own fraught time too: Never lose sight of the individual. We are all involved in many systems, from our families to our political parties to our economic system, but each individual has dignity and complexity as a human being and letting life and people be complex is the better part of wisdom.
I've seen this novel compared to Middlemarch. It's been a while since I read Middlemarch, so I can't say too much about that comparison. I've read North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell more recently and this felt much more like a follow up 20th century novel to North and South. The slow, steady march of progress has come a long way by the 1930s, but onwards and upwards! Both then and now. This is such a richly wise and fun novel, and I have only scratched the surface of it in this review. If you're a fan of 20th century Brit lit, local politics, social history, and darn good characters then I highly recommend it!
Long-form review: National Provincial is set in Aire in 1935-36, which is a northern English town (a fictionalized Leeds). The story begins with twenty-seven-year old Mary Welburn returning to her native Aire from London. Mary attended Oxford on a scholarship and is a newspaper reporter, first in London and now in Aire. Though Mary doesn't get a ton of page time, she is one of the characters at the heart of the novel. Mary is returning to Aire because her sister, Doris, is getting married and someone needs to look after their invalid mother and teenage brother. Mary's father abandoned the family when the children were young and her mother is an emotionally closed woman. Mary was and is loved and encouraged by her maternal aunt and uncle Grace and John Allworthy. The Allworthys are also at the heart of the novel.
The Allworthys are a childless couple in their 60s who have worked tirelessly for the Labour movement over the past 50 years. (My English history and politics may get a bit shaky here, so bear with me! I've learned it all by osmosis with novels.) John and Grace were both raised in poverty. John was a major player in local strikes and helped to form a Union to represent the workers in Aire. By this point in his life, the Union is functioning well and has real power in the marketplace in Aire. John himself has served many years on the town council and is a well known, well respected, and even a beloved figure in town. Grace is equally well known and loved. John works at a ready-made clothing factory owned by a man named Ward. John feels the mellowing that comes with age and has to consider what his role is in politics in this new phase of his life.
John and Ward (I can't remember his first name!) grew up together in the slums of Aire, and Ward is now an immensely rich man with a big factory, many employees, and a lot of power in the community. He has a wife and two children who are just barely adults, Marjorie and Leslie (a boy). The Wards are financial equals with Aire's old families, but they're only tolerated in the social scene in town. It's the old new money v. old money conflict. Ward's children are in a tough spot because of this. They are educated according to the ideals of the upper class at the time, but they only really fit in amongst other new money families. Leslie is a particularly sensitive young man who both respects and is scared of his father. Ward Senior is a distant and austere parent and it has created emotional havoc for his son. This family plays a major role in the story, but they're not at the heart of it in the same way Mary, the Allworthys, and the Hardings are.
One of the reigning gentry and Tory (conservative) families in Aire is the Harding family. Lionel and his wife and their surviving adult children, Robert and Stephen, both married and in their 30s, and Clare, in her 20s. The Hardings' third son Neville was killed in the Great War and his family still mourns his loss, especially Lionel and Clare. Both Stephen and Robert play major roles in the story, though Robert more so in the final fourth of the novel. Lionel has served on the town council with John in the past, so he knows and respects the Allworthys. Though Lionel is a conservative, he is wonderfully even-tempered and broad-minded. He is observant and intelligent and is not afraid of emotions or conflict.
Stephen is another heart character. He is the equivalent of a kind of HR manager at Ward's factory. He is married to Joy and has two young boys. Joy comes from a landed gentry family and is beautiful, but has retained a kind of schoolgirl mentality to the world. To Joy, the class system should remain firmly in place and her class can do no wrong. As Stephen comes into contact with Mary Welburn and the Allworthys, he begins to have his eyes opened to the world outside his comfortably insular class and political bubble. He begins to move to the left, politically, and this causes fissures in the lives of many characters.
There are many, many other characters who are all written beautifully and realistically. Lettice Cooper relentlessly explores every type of person in this novel. There is the slum-raised, social climbing snob Olive who works at Ward's. There is the young man Tom Sutton, a gifted orphan who thinks of John and Grace as his uncle and aunt and leads a strike against Ward and against the Union and runs for city council. There is Rosie, Robert and Beryl's maid-of-all-work, who is vulgar (or so some characters think) and goodhearted. There are two young-ish, middle class couples, the Grants and Unwins, who work at the university and have influence on Leslie Ward (for good and for ill). There is Harold Pearson, who is a Communist. And ever so many more...
The veneer of the novel is the fraught political situation at this point in English history. The questions are exacerbated by the intensity of political movements overseas in Germany and Russia and the steady march towards war, though there are only whispers of it in the novel. Lettice Cooper was writing this in the time the novel was set, so it's fascinatingly free of any hindsight from WWII or beyond. For the most part, Cooper writes her characters with complexity and nuance. The young hotheads like Tom can be endearing at times. John Allworthy struggles with hatred towards a man. I can symphathize with Olive who just wants to have nice things around her and nice clothes after growing up poor.
The characters who are at the heart of the novel--Stephen, Mary, Lionel, John, and Grace--are there because they have high emotional intelligence and don't see the world through a strict right/wrong lense. They are each passionate and opinionated, but have a humble courage that frees them from snobbery, allows them to befriend others who are different, and hold their own opinions loosely. There is a steadiness to each of them, a salt of the earth quality. I loved reading about them and cheered whenever they came on the page! These characters have a wisdom to share for our own fraught time too: Never lose sight of the individual. We are all involved in many systems, from our families to our political parties to our economic system, but each individual has dignity and complexity as a human being and letting life and people be complex is the better part of wisdom.
I've seen this novel compared to Middlemarch. It's been a while since I read Middlemarch, so I can't say too much about that comparison. I've read North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell more recently and this felt much more like a follow up 20th century novel to North and South. The slow, steady march of progress has come a long way by the 1930s, but onwards and upwards! Both then and now. This is such a richly wise and fun novel, and I have only scratched the surface of it in this review. If you're a fan of 20th century Brit lit, local politics, social history, and darn good characters then I highly recommend it!
February 11, 2010
In the late 1930s, Mary Welburn is forced to interrupt her successful London career to return her hometown in the industrial north of England and take care of her mother when her sister marries; soon she and a cast of sharply observed characters are caught up in a provincial political struggle with national implications. National Provincial has echoes both of Winifred Holtby's South Riding (protagonist returns to provincial town of origin) and of Cooper's own The New House (protagonist is expected to take care of her aging mother). This was a tough book to find (it's long out of print), but worth the effort. I especially liked Cooper's engagement with the characters' political beliefs and her examination of the differences (some very small) between various social classes.
September 1, 2016
This book was made for me. Part of a favorite, (sadly small) genre of 1930s class struggle in Northern English towns (see also South Riding and I'm Not Complaining). Interesting, sympathetically-presented characters, high-quality, unsentimental writing, and an political analysis of its own time that seemed to be written with 40 years hindsight. Only criticism is that the main-ish character, Mary, could have had a longer, more flushed out story, instead of being given basically equal time to a dozen other plotlines.
March 19, 2020
It is a brick of a book. It reads like a series of sermons sometimes. It is more a development of character types, a process of ideas then a narrative plot. But for all that it is still a radical read, that really was quite a revolutionary work written as it was in 1938. There is so much political, social, local, international, gender, class stuff going on, the world was changing and WW2 was on the horizon, people felt the shifts but didn't know what was coming. This book trys to understand and make sense of those shifts without the luxury of hindsight. And written by a woman - WOW. Please remember all these facts when you read it, then you will realise what an achievement LC has pulled off.
Toast
Toast
January 18, 2022
This, for me, was one of those rare books. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, kept sneaking away to read it while I should have been doing other things, and stayed up way too late finishing it. I kept thinking that 1937 England felt so similar to modern day America, but eventually decided this kind of story, about a bunch of well-meaning but sometimes terribly flawed and divided people disagreeing about how best to make a better world, (and indeed the need for change at all) is simply timeless.
May 9, 2015
4.5. Excellent, think twentieth-century Gaskell.
August 25, 2025
More of a 3.5*
March 26, 2021
You know, at first I was not sure precisely. I was so entirely absorbed by Cooper’s book The New House. And this is not that. There are an enormous number of characters and shifts in story from moment to moment and sometimes (at least at first) this feels abrupt and, well, hard to follow. But then.... Something shifted in me as I gave myself over to the enormity of her project, the many voices and the inner lives of these characters inside this provincial town that come to represent England and its changing political landscape during the rise of fascism. I was struck by how relevant the book is and by the shocking number of insights that I had to stop for and admire. Perhaps not Middlemarch I think but a kind of industrial retelling with some urgent and necessary thinking. A very ambitious book.
September 7, 2019
I’ll admit this novel was one I wasn’t in a hurry to keep picking back up as it’s written in quite a dry style and there is a profusion of characters that, because of the style of writing, I wasn’t always sure who was talking.
Lettice Cooper brings to life inter-war Yorkshire very well in this novel and in many places it’s an accurate portrait of modern Britain today - despite it being written 70 years ago.
It takes a long time (150 pages +) for this book to really come to life in terms of plot and this definitely spoilt my overall reading experience.
So this goes down as a “glad I read it as I learnt something” rather than a “great read” book for me.
Lettice Cooper brings to life inter-war Yorkshire very well in this novel and in many places it’s an accurate portrait of modern Britain today - despite it being written 70 years ago.
It takes a long time (150 pages +) for this book to really come to life in terms of plot and this definitely spoilt my overall reading experience.
So this goes down as a “glad I read it as I learnt something” rather than a “great read” book for me.
August 3, 2021
I loved this book. It reminded me a lot of South Riding by Winifred Holtby in that the main character is an independent young woman moving to a Yorkshire town and falling in love with an unattainable man. This and South Riding aren’t romances though. Both novels are concerned also with local politics and give a good idea of Yorkshire life in the 1930’s. Where NP has the edge over SR for me is the mood of uncertainty and concern it evokes, caused by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the rise of fascism throughout Europe. The book was published in 1938 so the author and her readers could only have guessed at what was to come.
June 15, 2019
The longest book that Persephone have published so far, this looks intimidating but turns out to be super readable. In concept, it is a Middlemarch of the 1930s, presenting a picture of the society of Aire (a fictionalised Leeds) from top to bottom, from old money, through rich industrialists, academics, trade unionists, to the textile workers, coal miners and the unemployed. The story of 18 months in the city from the summer of 1935 to the winter of 1936, in the unsettled years before WW2, are disturbingly resonant of our national and provincial concerns today, 80 years later.
February 10, 2022
I really enjoyed this massive book in which barely anything happens, just people living their lives. it’s interesting from a purely social history point of view, it was written in 1938 but there’s plenty of foreboding about the situation in Europe. The characters also see change in their personal circumstances that the old order is going and some even feel there may be a revolution. It’s some of the minor characters that really bring this alive, my favourites are Olive with her snobbishness and Rosie with her down to earth fun attitude, the juxtaposition of those two is just joyful.
January 26, 2019
Set in Leeds ('Aire') between 1934 & 1936 and published in 1938, this monumental novel dives in and out of consciousnesses of all classes, creating a highly prescient depiction of the years leading to the Second World War, and indeed, of our current Brexit times. Cooper sees these years as a time when the new order was overthrowing the old, of the inevitable displacement of the entitled ruling classes with working men and women, of increased equality. Sadly this has not yet come to pass. Yet the dangerous rise of fascism and communism, of Mussolini and Hitler, the oppression of the Jews, the invasion of 'Abyssinia', the struggle between the classes are all carefully documented and woven into the story, so that war feels inevitable.
February 27, 2025
Epic tale set in a northern English city in the years before World War II, addressing how a collection of people - different classes, different backgrounds, different politics - dealt with the challenges emerging in Europe, and which force them to deal with the challenges of change, in politics, in society and in their personal lives. It has huge echoes with many of the issues we are forced to confront today, for which our political, regulatory and economic systems feel ill-equipped to cope. As I began reading, I struggled with the sheer number of characters and found it confusing, but the book, although it is a bit of a brick in size, gained momentum, and engaged interest much more. I could not shake my surprise at just how many parallels there were with today, and how people deal differently with the degree of change they face, and the divisions present in our communities.
August 20, 2025
My brain is full. I found this book touching, funny, inspiring, and so, so long. It’s definitely Middlemarch-esque in its peregrinations. I’ll be thinking about it for a while.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews