Winifred Holtby Part I

Winifred Holtby is most famous for her novel, South Riding, and she is also well known for her close friendship with Vera Brittain, the writer and political activist.

She was born to a well to do “gentleman farmer” in Yorkshire in 1898, and her mother was a pioneer as one of the first women to be active in local politics, serving in the East Riding County council.

Winifred was educated at home and was planning to go to Oxford, like Brittain.  However, she joined the WAACs towards the end of the war and went to France.   

After the War, she came back to England and entered Somerville College, where many famous women writers at the time were educated, including Dorothy Sayers.   She met Vera Brittain and the 2 of them formed a close friends.  Winifred Holtby’s life was tragically short, but it was busy, and fulfilling.  She wrote several novels and a lot of journalism.  She was also a director of the liberal paper “Time and Tide” which was owned by the wealthy and liberal minded Margaret Lady Rhondda who used it to promulgate “good causes”, including the improvement of women’s lives.  This was a cause that appeared to Winifred and to her friend Vera Brittain.  They were both also pacifists but it is possible that had Holtby lived long enough, she and Vera might have disagreed about whether it was necessary at times to abandon their  pacifism and declare war, when Hitler was trying to conquer Europe. 

Winifred wanted equal rights for women but she was more involved with working in Africa for equal rights for Africans, as it was still the colonial era….One of her novels “Manoa Manoa” is set in Africa and her most famous heroine, Sarah Burton in South Riding, has worked for years as a teacher in South Africa and has been engaged to a man there who did not share her views about Africans
The 2 women were both ardently socialist and feminist…and both were pacifists  -as were many people just after the War... Having seen its horrors, they were deeply opposed to the idea of ever having another War.   Sayers was more conservative.  She had not engaged in war work, and while she believed in women’s rights, she was generally speaking of a different political complexion to many other young women at Oxford.
Brittain and Holtby decided to move to London and become writers.  Both had well to do families, who were able to help financially until they were successful. However both found that being women, their families weren’t as supportive of their having careers as they might have been in helping a son.  Also, both of them were expected to “drop everything” and go home to help if any of their relatives had need of someone to help out with any family problems or illness.

They shared a flat and were active in support of the League of Nations.  Winifred was a prolific journalist and public speaker and one of her major interests was working for the unionisation of black workers in South Africa. She began to write novels, as did Brittain, but Holtby had more writing talent. Her early novels included Anderby Wold and the Crowded Street, which were set in provincial England… although she was increasingly part of the metropolitan London “set” of writers and thinkers.   

Winifred and Vera had a very special and unusual relationship… in that they lived together even after Vera married George Catlin, an American academic.  Brittain comes across to me at least as egotistical.  While she loved Winifred, it seems to me that her relationship with Winifred and her husband involved her demanding love and devotion from as many people as possible.  She made conditions for her husband, that he was to accept Winifred living with them and that he would live partly in America and then spend the rest of his time with them.

Winifred seems to have loved Vera better than anyone else, though she herself also had boyfriends.  Winifred also had intense friendships with other women at various times. It was of course a different era, in the earlier part of the 20^th century, where close friendships with someone of the same gender wasn’t looked on as possibly homosexual.  But Winifred and Vera had very intense friendships with women, which almost rivalled in emotion, their relationships with men….

Winifred had an on and off relationship with Harry Pearson, a young man whom she had known from her youth in Yorkshire.  Harry was good natured but not always reliable. He led a peripatetic life, drifting in and out of jobs and moving around.

Winifred worked very hard and began to have health problems. But she continued to do her writing and other work, to help Vera to run their house and be an aunt to Vera’s children, (though they did have servants) and she often had to rush off to her own home at times when there was a family crisis.