We should be grateful that Macmillan’s latest regional literary anthology is entirely free of the kind of hyperbole that drowns the general reader in great gouts of misplaced northern pride. The bloviated, dialect-heavy, Yorkshire-ness of, for example, Dickie Byrd, Fred Trueman and Geoffrey Boycott (why does cricket attract professional Yorkshire bores?), characterises an attitude of mind that is consumed by cultural superiority, and in some, a lunatic thirst for secessionism.

Thankfully, the present selection of pieces has been ably curated by writer and film historian David Stuart Davies, who approaches his task with intelligence, wit and a proper commitment to research. Dividing his journey through a literary landscape into sensibly themed sections – ‘Coast and Countryside’, ‘People’ and ‘Towns and Cities’ – Davies takes care to preface each writer with explanatory notes, whose breadth and detachment yield genuine insights into context, motivation and contemporary experience. Better this than a cursory foreword penned by a marketable celebrity who has little knowledge of bookish history, and even less of how to write.

And whilst familiar ground is covered here, we also find vignettes from lesser known Yorkshire writers. Not least, a poet, writer and Surrey born socialite who became a ‘self-appointed’ Yorkshire lass: Dorothy Una Ratcliffe produced serviceable poems in a Dales dialect acquired painstakingly in the interests of authenticity. One such encapsulates the transience of time in a single sestet:

‘Life’s like a fair: a vast of work afore
A few hours fun;
An’ lang ere stars have rested ower t’moor
Light’s out, all’s done:
But to us each, according to our daring,
Time gives some Fairing.’ (‘Life’s Like A Fair’)

Or the Victorian historian, Arthur H. Norway, whose account of the quietude of fin de siècle York combines erudition with an eye for the illusory divertissement of nostalgia, in a beautifully constructed extract from his book, The Highways & Byways in Yorkshire.

Almost always on-point, Davies is perceptive on context and insightful as to the wider relevance or social value of his authorial choices’ literary achievements. That Nicholas Nickleby was based on Charles Dickens’ own research into Yorkshire boarding schools is a testament to the novelist’s instinct for reform, and a necessary prelude to change. Davies:

‘The formidable attack on such schools lent imaginative weight to indictments which had already been circulating, and helped to speed their demise.’

An extract from Charlotte Brontë’s fictional study of the Luddite uprisings in Shirley continues a theme here, and if the writer’s fundamental conservatism makes of her novel a less sympathetic vehicle for social reform, Davies is right to signify a mental state afflicted by the recent loss of three siblings in any assessment of Shirley’s ongoing resonance. The proto-feminism of Anne Brontë, and the untamed imaginative excesses of Emily’s prose and poetry are indispensable to any Yorkshire literary anthology; both feature fulsomely here, along with a turn of self-lacerating solipsism from their benighted brother, Branwell, and fine even-handed commentaries from Davies.

The resurgence of the working class voice in postwar ‘kitchen sink’ narratives finds a fitting correspondence in the editor’s selection. The so-called free-flow of opportunity, of equality of aspiration, is stifled at point of denouement as the terminally florid Billy Fisher is unable to escape the comfort zone of the imagination in Keith Waterhouse’s clever delineation of class in Billy Liar. Whilst elsewhere, Bradford-born John Braine’s sensual paean to the crossing of class in Room at the Top, underlines a near monomaniacal determination to broach the danger of transgression in the figure of the bog-ordinary, but brutal, Joe Lampton; and the uber-simplicity of Barry Hines in the magnificently focussed A Kestrel for a Knave resigns the young Billy Casper to a failure of hope, excepting through the prismatic imagination of his naturalistic relationship with a hawk.

If the congenial, and beautifully realised observational-layerings of J. B. Priestley’s The Good Companions cast a spell over our remembrance of a West Riding of mills and the ‘streak of slime’ of canal basins, then that nostalgia is trimly re-ordered in the uniquely nuanced backward glance of Alan Bennett, whose view of the past is tempered by an intuitive sense of Yorkshire culture that no longer holds, but that many of us recall for its authenticity.

And perhaps best of all, in a book of intriguing diversions, is the historical view from the north eastern coastline. Whitby has been the temporary home of very many writers over many centuries, and several are represented here, all in the service of close observation, of an ancient harbour town whose wynds and staircases lend themselves to the arcane, even the macabre, and whose atmospheric recognition endures into our time. From Caedmon to H. P. Kendall (who gives an astonishing inventory of former visitors) to the creator of Dracula, Bram Stoker, who visited Whitby in 1882 and was immediately taken with the town’s strange terrain, the hold sustains. Inferring sinister suggestion in the wharves and shadows, Stoker set the beginning of his most celebrated novel in Whitby, and created a genuinely atmospheric old town, whose narrow lanes will no doubt remain an annual pilgrimage for droves of Goths and Steam Punks in perpetuity.

A little further down Yorkshire’s long coast is Hull – birthplace and home of seventeenth century metaphysical poet, Andrew Marvell, whose acuity of word use and metaphor in ‘To His Coy Mistress’, has gilded his place in any dictionary of aphorisms. A poem of seduction, invoking carpe diem in the face of the brevity of human existence, Marvell’s masterwork charms as it inveigles its way under the skin of its intended inamorata:

‘Now, therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may’.

A pity, in a book of such eclectic breadth, that Davies couldn’t have included a poem or two by that other long-time resident of Hull, Philip Larkin. Looking away from the mouth of the Humber, into the limitless distance of sky, sea and horizon, Larkin’s métier depends on a degree of transcendence. Perhaps we learn from the view outwards and upwards.