Reissued to tie in with the forthcoming Andrew Davies adaptation for the BBC, Winifred Holtby's last and best-known novel is a sprawling portrait of provincial life in England between the wars. The great war still casts a long shadow  most of her characters have lost something: a limb, a lover  the economy is floundering and times are difficult for everyone in her fictional northern town.

Holtby's mother was a Yorkshire alderman and she writes with a respect for the workings of local government and the positive effects it could have on people's lives. She gradually builds a picture of a community, with its complex social relationships and everyday dilemmas. Though her novel is populated by a large cast of characters, she never drops people into boxes; each individual, from alderman to landlord to schoolgirl, is well-shaped and intriguing, their reactions sometimes contrary, their actions unpredictable and all too human. The relationship at the heart of the novel, between Sarah Burton, the independently minded, flame-haired spinster headmistress, and Robert Carne, the taciturn gentleman farmer with the delicate daughter and unstable wife, is indicative of this.

At first there are inevitable comparisons to be made with Jane Eyre, but this would be too easy for Holtby, and she steers things towards a different place, one altogether more poignant and stubbornly grounded in the real. Though her prose is pedestrian in places, there is a bleak, brave quality to her writing, and certain passages are desperately wrenching.

While the novel undoubtedly remains a fascinating depiction of a time and place, it is more than that. In its portrait of the workings of a community, in its celebration of social spirit, and in Burton's final urging of her girls to serve yet also to challenge and question and strive, it feels both timely and necessary.