‘She was incandescent with the radiance of her short, concentrated life’

A look back at one of the region’s strong and independent women Winifred Holtby

Winifred Holtby was an english novelist and journalist, now best known for her novel South riding, which was posthumously published in 1936.

She was born to a prosperous farming family in the village of rudston, in the east riding of Yorkshire.

Her father was david Holtby and her mother, Alice, was afterwards the first alderwoman on the east riding County Council.

Winifred was educated at home by a governess and then at Queen Margaret’s School in Scarborough.

Although she passed the entrance exam for Somerville College, Oxford, in 1917, she chose to join the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in early 1918 but soon after she arrived in france, the first World War came to an end and she returned home.

during this period, Holtby met Harry Pearson, the only man who stimulated romantic feelings in her, due primarily to his tales of the suffering soldiers endured during the war.

in 1919, she returned to study at the University of Oxford where she met Vera Brittain, a fellow student and later the author of Testament of Youth, with whom she maintained a lifelong friendship.

After graduating from Oxford, in 1921, Winifred and Vera moved to London, hoping to establish themselves as writers. (The blue plaque at no. 82 doughty Street is where they lived).

She was, together with Brittain, an ardent feminist, socialist and pacifist. She lectured extensively for the League of nations Union.

She was active in the independent Labour Party and was a staunch campaigner for the unionisation of black workers in South Africa.

in a 1926 article, Holtby 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.

After Brittain’s marriage in 1925 to George Catlin, Holtby shared her friend’s homes in nevern Place earls Court and subsequently at 19 Glebe Place, Chelsea; Catlin resented the arrangement and his wife’s close friendship with Holtby, who nevertheless became an adoptive aunt to Brittain’s two children, John and Shirley (Baroness Williams of Crosby).

Shirley describes her as being “tall, nearly 6ft, and slim, she was incandescent with the radiance of her short and concentrated life”.

Winifred began to suffer from high blood pressure, recurrent headaches and bouts of lassitude, and in 1931 she was diagnosed as suffering from Bright’s disease.

Her doctor gave her only two years to live. Aware of her impending death, Holtby put all her remaining energy into what became her most important book, South riding.

Winifred Holtby died on September 29, 1935, aged 37. She never married, though Harry Pearson proposed to her on her deathbed, possibly at the instigation of Vera Brittain. Holtby’s fame was derived mainly from her journalism: she wrote for more than 20 newspapers and magazines, including the feminist journal Time and Tide and the Manchester Guardian newspaper. in her book ‘Women and a changing civilisation’ Holtby linked the 1930s reaction against feminism to a broader “revolt against reason which has affected the intellectual life of the entire Western World”.

Holtby contextualized the rise of the Nazis, and the Western turn to the political Right in general, as a reaction to the broader upheavals of war and depression: “Just after the First World War, society was infected by a rush of idealism to the head.

“Democracy and reason, equality and co-operation were acclaimed as uncontested virtues.

“In the new constitutions of Europe and America were incorporated splendid statements about the freedom of opinion, equality of the sexes, and accessibility of education.

“We were about to build a brave new world upon the ruins of catastrophe earthquakes, Chinese famine, African drought.

“The individual will seem unimportant, the individual personality is dwarfed, by happenings on so large a scale. This is the slump complex, this narrowing of ambition, this closing-in alike of ideas and opportunities.

“Somewhere, a spring of vitality and hope has failed.”

Holtby perceived feminism as necessarily tied to enlightenment rationality, progress, and social engineering:

In 1974 South Riding was adapted by

Stan Barstow for Yorkshire Television. Her letters, along with many of Holtby’s other papers, were donated in 1960 to Hull Central Library in Yorkshire and are now held at the Hull History Centre. Holtby was buried in All Saints’ churchyard in Rudston, East Yorkshire, just yards from the house in which she was born.

Her epitaph is “God give me work till my life shall end and life till my work is done”.