(In the sleepy village of Hardrascliffe Mary Robson has fi...)
In the sleepy village of Hardrascliffe Mary Robson has finally paid off the mortgage on her beloved farm Anderby Wold. Married to her much older and extremely passive cousin John Robson, she has created a name for herself on her own, with ceaseless philanthropy and constant hard-work. But whilst there are many who adore her, Mary faces opposition from her husband’s sister Sarah, whose possessiveness over her brother has caused divisions in the family. When the socialist David Rossitur visits the village he rouses excitement not only in the workers but with the mistress of Anderby Wold herself. The farmhands see hope in Rossitur’s message and tremors begin to shake the hierarchy that has influenced village life for so long. And Mary’s passions are split - between her farm and the ‘old ways’ of operating, and the return of youth through the figure of Mr. Rossitur. Will Mary continue along the path that she has set herself? Or will the changing world around her force her hand? Anderby Wold is a moving twentieth-century tale of love, hope, and change.
(This is the story of Muriel Hammond, at twenty living wit...)
This is the story of Muriel Hammond, at twenty living within the suffocating confines of Edwardian middle-class society in Marshington, a Yorkshire village. A career is forbidden to her. Pretty, but not pretty enough, she fails to achieve the one thing required of her - to find a suitable husband. Then comes the First World War, a watershed that tragically revolutionizes the lives of her generation. But for Muriel, it offers work, friendship, freedom, and one last chance to find a special kind of happiness...
(Joanna Burton was born in South Africa but sent by her mi...)
Joanna Burton was born in South Africa but sent by her missionary father to be raised in Yorkshire. There she dreams of the far-off lands she will visit and adventures to come. At 18, tall and flaxen-haired, she meets Teddy Leigh, a young man on his way to the trenches of World War I. Joanna has been in love before - with Sir Walter Raleigh, with the Scarlet Pimpernel, with Coriolanus - but this is different. Teddy tells her he's been given the world to wear as a golden ball. Joanna believes him and marries him, but the fabled shores recede into the distance when, after the war, Teddy returns in ill health. The magic land turns out to be the harsh reality of motherhood and life on a Yorkshire farm, yet still, she dares to dream.
(Caroline Denton-Smyth is an eccentric, dressed in trailin...)
Caroline Denton-Smyth is an eccentric, dressed in trailing feathers and jangling beads, peering out from behind her lorgnette. Sitting alone in her West Kensington bedsitter, she dreams of the Christian Cinema Company - her vehicle for reform. Caroline sees herself as a pioneer, one who must risk everything for the 'Cause of the Right.' Her Board of Directors is a motley crew including Basil St-Denis, upper-crust but impecunious; Joseph Rosenbaum, aspiring to Society and Eton for his son; Eleanor de la Roux, Caroline's independent cousin from South Africa; Hugh Macafee, a curt Scottish film technician; young Father Mortimer, scarred from the First World War; and Clifton Johnson, a seedy American scenario writer on the make. Winifred Holtby affectionately observes the foibles of human nature in this sparkling satire, first published in 1931.
(Virginia Woolf is one of the most important writers of th...)
Virginia Woolf is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. Part of the Bloomsbury set, she lived surrounded by other artists and writers, and her novels and essays have inspired generations of readers and writers ever since their publication. Her personal struggles with depression and mental illness and her feminist beliefs come across strongly in her work, illuminating an important period in British social history, not just for women’s rights, but for a whole nation scarred by the effects of two world wars. Winifred Holtby gives us Woolf the critic, the essayist, and the experimental novelist in this critical memoir which is of particular interest as the work of one intelligent, though very different, novelist commenting on another. Holtby’s careful reading of Woolf’s work is set in the context of the debate between modernist and traditional writing in the 1920s and 1930s. Although Holtby greatly admires Woolf’s art, she considers its limitations as an elite form that ignores the material conditions of everyday life and the consequent social responsibility expected of the novel.
(Mandoa is a small African state: at its head, a Virgin Pr...)
Mandoa is a small African state: at its head, a Virgin Princess, conceiving (immaculately) further princesses. The old traditions remain undisturbed until Mandoa’s Lord High Chamberlain, Safi Tala, visits Addis Ababa. There he discovers baths and cocktail shakers, motor cars, and cutlery from Sheffield, telephones, and handkerchiefs. In short, he has seen an apocalyptic vision - a new heaven and a new earth. Meanwhile, in England it is 1931. Maurice Durrant, youngest director of Prince’s Tours Limited, has won North Donnington for the Conservatives. His socialist brother Bill is unemployed and their friend Jean Stanbury loses her job on The Byeword, a radical weekly paper. How all three, and others too, find themselves in Mandoa for the wedding of the Royal Princess to her Arch-archbishop is hilariously told in this wonderful satirical novel, first published in 1933.
(Winifred Holtby (1898-1935) is remembered today mainly as...)
Winifred Holtby (1898-1935) is remembered today mainly as the author of 'South Riding'. But 'South Riding' was only the last of Winifred's six published novels and many other publications of poems, pamphlets, short stories and newspaper articles and reviews which revealed her as an outstanding advocate of feminism, socialism and pacifism and a champion of other progressive and humanitarian causes. This collection of her short stories were written between 1923 and 1933 and range over all her interests and from her native Yorkshire to the wider world.
(Winifred Holtby's masterpiece is a rich evocation of the ...)
Winifred Holtby's masterpiece is a rich evocation of the lives and relationships of the characters of South Riding. Sarah Burton, the fiery young headmistress of the local girls' school; Mrs. Beddows, the district's first alderwoman - based on Holtby's own mother; and Robert Carne, the conservative gentleman-farmer locked in a disastrous marriage - with whom the radical Sarah Burton falls in love. Showing how public decisions can mold the individual, this story offers a panoramic and unforgettable view of Yorkshire life.
Winifred Holtby was an English journalist, and novelist. She is best known for her novel "South Riding" about a Yorkshire community struggling with the Depression of the 1930s. Through her proportionally epic, perceptually homely novels, Holtby showed her readers a revelation they could share: that if one thought of the world as a single community, there could be no more war.
Background
Winifred Holtby was born on June 23, 1898, in Rudston, Yorkshire. She was the youngest daughter of David Holtby, a farmer, and Alice Winn, who became the first woman alderman in the East Riding County Council. In her early childhood, Holtby developed a love for the Yorkshire countryside and later portrayed its people and landscape in her fiction. Due to her father's ill health, the household was mostly run by Winifred's mother. She encouraged her daughter to write poetry and had her first collection printed - as a surprise - when Winifred was just 13.
Education
In 1909 Holtby entered Queen Margaret's School in Scarborough where she wrote for the school magazine. She enrolled in 1917 in Somerville College, one of the female colleges at Oxford, but broke off her university career to work in a London nursing home and serve as a volunteer in the Signal Unit of the Women's Auxiliary Corps. She was posted in France in 1918 and returned the next year to Oxford to finish her history studies. In 1921 she became one of the first women to be awarded a degree by the university.
At Somerville, she met Vera Brittain and after an initial period of the antagonism the two became close friends and after graduating they moved to London together to pursue literary careers.
After graduating Winifred Holtby worked as a journalist, writing for the Manchester Guardian, Daily Express, Evening Standard, Good Housekeeping, and the News Chronicle. In 1926 she became director of Time and Tide, a feminist weekly. Holtby's first novels, "Anderby Work!" (1923) and "Along a Crowded Street" (1924), received favorable reviews and small commercial success. In the latter novel, Holtby first began to approach the topic of spinsterhood. In Holtby's third novel, "The Land of Green Ginger" (1927), she again focuses on the romantic dreams of women as they erode the possibility of women’s social achievement.
Holtby's observations of racism found their way to the novel "Mandoa, Mandoa!" (1933). In the story, set in a fictitious African state, Holtby satirized the unfortunate British travel industry. "The Astonishing Island" (1933) was also satirical and examined contemporary English customs and ways of life.
Like Brittain, Holtby basically believed, that all writing should have a purpose behind it. The protagonists in Holtby's novels were often strong-willed and courageous, whose struggle reflected her own experiences and feminist views, like the social crusader of "Poor Caroline" (1931) or the heroine from" Land of Green Ginger," who rises above her oppressive farmhouse surroundings.
Holtby's other works include a critical study of "Virginia Woolf" (1932), "Women in a Changing Civilization" (1934), a history of the women's movement which was a commercial success, and a play, "Take Back Your Freedom," with an anti-Fascist theme. It was revised and completed by Norman Ginsbury and first produced in 1940. Holtby's correspondence with Vera Brittain was collected in "Letters to a Friend" (1937). Holtby once wrote to Brittain, "We are so entangled now in people's minds that Lady Steele Maitland, my chairman at Thursday's meeting, introduced me as 'Miss Vera Holtby!' to loud laughter and applause." Holtby dismissed rumors of lesbianism as "Too, too Chelsea."
From an early age, Holtby also wrote poems. However, she destroyed them or left unfinished. Her posthumous collection, entitled "The Frozen Earth and Other Poems" (1935), was compiled by Vera Brittain. One of the pieces, 'For the Ghost of Elinor Wylie,' first printed in Time and Tide in December 1933, was about the American poet and novelist, who died from a disease similar to Holtby's own.
Holtby suffered from a heart condition, which gradually diminished her energy. When she collapsed in 1932, she was told it was exhaustion due to overwork. While traveling around France in 1933, she had a sequence of headaches, which she tried to cure with brandy and soda.
Before her death, Holtby managed to complete "South Riding." This book tells the story of two women, Mrs. Beddows, an older female politician, and Sarah Burton, the middle-aged head of a girls' school. Both women fall in love with Robert Carne, a country squire, but both women's loves are thwarted. It was published with the help of Vera Brittain, her literary executor, although Holtby's mother Alice did not approve its portrayal of herself and her work as a county councilor. The book has remained in print ever since.
Winifred Holtby was a prolific journalist and writer whose most famous work "South Riding" was published posthumously and became an instant bestseller, providing scholarship income for Somerville for many years. It won posthumously the 1936 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Holtby is remembered for her generous, thoughtful novels of human interdependence. Her feminist perspective - like her anti-racist attitudes - were part of this belief in human interdependence, and she helped others to see what she saw through her kind-eyed, old-fashioned novels.
The Winifred Holtby Prize for the best regional novel was established in 1967. Winifred Holtby Academy, a coeducational secondary school is named after Winifred Holtby.
Winifred was critical of the class system and inherited privileges and by the late 1920s, she was active in the Independent Labour Party.
Views
Holtby was a socialist and feminist. She wrote: "Personally, I am a feminist... because I dislike everything that feminism implies… I want to be about the work in which my real interests lie... But while injustice is done and opportunity denied to the great majority of women, I shall have to be a feminist." Like her companion, Vera Brittain, Winifred was a pacifist and lectured extensively on women's rights for the League of Nations Union and Six Point Group. In 1929 Holtby published "A New Voter's Guide to Party Programmes," directed for women after they got in 1928 the right to vote in Great Britain - 22 years after Finnish women, who were granted the vote in 1906, the first in Europe.
In 1926 Holtby spend six months in South Africa, where she learned about the conditions of native South Africans and began speaking for the unionization of black workers. "She went to preach the gospel of peace to white South Africa," wrote Vera Brittain in "Testament of Friendship" (1940), "she returned to plead, with passion and pertinacity, the cause of black South Africa to an indifferent England. Holtby took a keen interest in the struggle for equal rights in South Africa. She criticized General Jan Smuts when he failed to stop the introduction of racist legislation. Holtby argued that the reason for this was that "because for Smuts and his contemporaries, the human horizon does not yet extend to colored races, as, for Fox and his 18th-century contemporaries, it did not extend to English women."
Quotations:
"The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation; it is understanding."
"What a strange distance there is between ill people and well ones."
"These are they whose youth was violently severed by war and death; a word on the telephone, a scribbled line on paper, and their future ceased. They have built up their lives again, but their safety is not absolute, their fortress not impregnable."
"The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing."
Personality
Winifred's relationship with Vera created a certain amount of gossip. Vera's daughter, Shirley Williams, argued: "Some critics and commentators have suggested that their relationship must have been a lesbian one. My mother deeply resented this. She felt that it was inspired by a subtle anti-feminism to the effect that women could never be real friends unless there was a sexual motivation, while the friendships of men had been celebrated in literature from classical times. My mother was instinctively heterosexual. But as a famous woman author holding progressive opinions, she became an icon to feminists and in particular to lesbian feminists." However, Vera's husband, George Edward Catlin, did not approve of the relationship. He wrote later: "You preferred her to me. It humiliated me and ate me up."
Physical Characteristics:
In the early 1930s, Winifred began to suffer with high-blood-pressure, recurrent headaches, and bouts of lassitude. According to Shirley Williams: "She was subject to bouts of serious illness, the consequence of a childhood episode of scarlet fever that led to sclerosis of the kidneys." Eventually, she was diagnosed as suffering from Bright's Disease. Her doctor told her that she probably only had two years to live.
Quotes from others about the person
"What I remember above all about Winifred Holtby is her radiance. She was a ray of sunshine in the intense and preoccupied atmosphere of home life in my early years... She was Viking-like in appearance, impressively statuesque with bright blue eyes and very pale flaxen hair." - Shirley Williams
Interests
Writers
Virginia Woolf
Connections
In 1916, Harry Pearson, a childhood friend, came home wounded from the war and declared his love for Winifred. She was too immature and unsure to reciprocate, and Harry took it badly.
He returned to the front and was wounded again, but it seems he suffered more psychologically, becoming detached and unable to commit to anything once the war was over. It was then that Winifred realized she was in love with him, and she remained so for the rest of her short life. But their relationship never worked out satisfactorily. Harry eventually proposed when she was on her deathbed.
