Winifred
Holtby, the daughter of David
Holtby, a prosperous Yorkshire farmer, was born in in 1898. Her mother,
Alice Holtby (Winn), was the first alderwoman in Yorkshire.
Winifred was educated at home by a governess and then at a boarding
school. She passed the entrance exam for Somerville
College but left in early 1918 to join the
Women's Auxiliary Army Corps .
Soon after she arrived in France the First World
War came to an end.
In 1919 she returned to Somerville College
where she met Vera Brittain. The two women
graduated together and in 1921 and they moved to London
where they hoped to establish themselves as writers. Vera's first
two novels, The
Dark Tide (1923) and Not
Without Honour (1925) sold badly
and were ignored by the critics. However, Winifred had more success
with Anderby Wold
(1923), The Crowded
Street (1924) and The
Land of Green Ginger (1927).
Winifred was also in great demand as a journalist and over the next
twenty years wrote for more than twenty newspapers and magazines.
This included the feminist journal, Time
and Tide, the Manchester
Guardian and a regular weekly article for the trade union
magazine, The Schoolmistress.
Books publishing during this period included a critical study of Virginia
Woolf and a volume of short stories, Truth
is Not Sober.
Like her companion, Vera Brittain, Winifred
was a pacifist and lectured
extensively for the League of
Nations Union. Winifred gradually became
more critical of the class system and inherited privileges and by
the late 1920s was active in the Independent Labour
Party.
In 1931 Winifred began to suffer with high-blood-pressure, recurrent
headaches and bouts of lassitude. Eventually she was diagnosed as
suffering from sclerosis of the kidneys. Her doctor told her that
she only had two years to live. Aware she was dying, Winifred put
all her remaining energy into what became her most important book,
South Riding.
Winifred Holtby died on 29th
September, 1935. South
Riding was published the following
year and was highly praised by the critics. Vera
Brittain subsequently wrote about their relationship in her book
Testament of Friendship
(1940).
(1)
Winifred Holtby's boyfriend, Harry Pearson, was fighting on the Western
Front when he was shot in the shoulder in 1916. While he was recovering
from his injuries he told Winifred about his experiences.
He told me about all the
enormities he had seen at the front - the mouthless mangled faces,
the human ribs whence rats would steal, the frenzied tortured horses,
with leg or quarter rent away, still living; the rotted farms, the
dazed and hopeless peasants; his innumerable suffering comrades; the
desert of no-man's-land; and all the thunder and moaning of war; and
the reek and freezing of war; and the driving - the callous, perpetual
driving by some great force which shovelled warm human hearts and
bodies, warm human hopes, by the million into the furnace.
(2)
In her diary Winifred Holtby wrote down why she decided to join the
Women's Army Artillery Corps.
(a) The desire to suffer
and to die - especially when suffering is associated with glory.
(b) Fear of immunity from danger when our friends are suffering.
(3)
After the war, Holtby explained in a letter to her friend Vera
Brittain, why she became a member of the Women's
Army Artillery Corps.
It
always seemed to me then that I yielded to desire to join the W.A.A.C.,
a desire which my poorer contemporaries, who had to hurry through
with their preparations to earn livings, could not afford to indulge
in. I had been so infinitely happier both nursing and in the W.A.A.C.
than I had been in that ghastly year at Oxford in 1917, that it never
occurred to me that Army life was anything but a fortunate privilege.
(4)
In 1919 Holtby attended a memorial service at St. Martin-in-the-Fields
for all the women from the London area who had died serving in the
First World War.
I
cannot describe it excepting that it was one of the most wonderful
things I ever saw or heard in my life. There were fifteen thousand
of us there, all in khaki. The band was splendid, and I wish you could
have heard those 15,000 girls all singing 'Fight the Good Fight' with
the rolling drums of the military band. The preacher was very good
and very simple. Many of the girls were sobbing when he had finished.
(5)
In a lecture, The Psychology of Peace and War, Holtby explained
how she fell in love with Harry Pearson in 1914.
I
was sixteen when the war started. The first thing it made me do was
fall in love. Brevity of life makes passion more insistent. The youngest
and fittest in uniform. The erotic attraction of death.
(6)
In an article for Good Housekeeping in 1935, Holtby described
the impact that the First World War had on young
women.
There
are today in England - and in France and Germany and Austria and Italy,
one imagines - women peacefully married to men whom they respect,
for whom they feel deep affection and whose children they have borne,
who will yet turn heartsick and lose colour at the sight of a khaki-clad
figure, a lean ghost from a lost age, a word, a memory. 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.
(7) In her book Testament
of Youth, Vera Brittain describes
meeting Winifred Holtby for the first time at Somerville College.
Miss Holtby, my tutor told me, was anxious, like myself, to study
the nineteenth century; she had also been down from college for a
year serving in the W.A.A.C., so perhaps that too would form a link
between us. Quite sure that it would not, and wishing that I could
have had the Dean to myself, I sauntered lugubriously down to Hertford,
where I was to meet this stranger towards whom I felt so unaccountably
antagonistic.
I was staring gloomily at the Oxford engravings and photographs of
the Dolomites which clustered together so companionably upon the Dean's
study wall, when Winifred Holtby burst suddenly in upon the morose
atmosphere of ruminant lethargy. Superbly tall, and vigorous as the
young Diana with her long straight limbs and her golden hair, her
vitality smote with the effect of a blow upon my jaded nerves. Only
too aware that I had lost that youth and energy for ever, I found
myself furiously resenting its possessor.
(8)
Winifred
Holtby, Time
and Tide
(6th August, 1926)
Hitherto, society has drawn one prime division between two sections
of people, the line
of sex-differentiation, with men above and women below. The Old Feminists
believe that the conception of this line, and the attempt to preserve
it by political and economic laws and social traditions not only checks
the development of the woman's personality, but
prevents her from making that contribution to the common good which
is the privilege and the obligation of every human being.
While the inequality exists,
while injustice is done and opportunities denied
to the great majority of women, I shall have to be a feminist, and
an Old Feminist,
with the motto Equality First. And I shan't be happy till I get
it.
(9)
Winifred Holtby
had been in love with Harry Pearson for sixteen years. When Vera
Brittain was told by Winifred's doctor that she only had a couple
of days to live, she asked Gordon Catlin to talk to Pearson.
Friday 27th September, 1935:
I told him that I thought Harry ought to tell Winifred he loved her
and always had; that he'd like to marry her when she was better; and
that only another man could put this over to him in such a way that
he wouldn't be offended or frightened; and that it should be done
at once, because, for all our renewed hopes, time might be short.
Saturday 28th September, 1935: At about three o'clock Hilda Reid rang
up to say that Dr. Obermer had been round to the home and had already
put Winifred under morphia; she was now unconscious and would never
be permitted to come back to consciousness again.
Later I learnt that Dr. Obermer did this because after Harry had been
with Winifred she was so happy and excited that he feared a violent
convulsion for her, with physical pain and mental anguish; and that
he thought it best to let her go out on that moment of happiness,
with the cruel realization that what she was hoping could never be
fulfilled.
(10) Vera
Brittain described how she and Gordon Catlin went to see Winifred
Holtby in hospital for the last time (29th September, 1935)
The room was dim, with a shaded lamp, but I saw at once that Winifred
had changed, and though her pulse was still tolerably strong, she
was breathing very shallowly, and wore the look that I had so often
seen on the faces of dying men in the War. Her lips were only slightly
parted; her eyes were serenely closed and her hair brushed back from
the forehead. She looked utterly at peace - "like a tired child",
as Gordon said afterwards, "who has at last had a good night
after many bad ones".
Shortly after six o'clock I realised that she was breathing more shallowly,
while her pulse was slower and weaker. After almost a quarter of an
hour her pulse, which I was holding, had almost stopped, and her breathing
seemed to come from her throat only. I nodded to Gordon and he came
and stood beside her. It was strange, incredible, after all the years
of our friendship and all that we had shared together, to feel her
life flickering out under my hand. Suddenly her pulse stopped; she
had given two or three deeper breaths and then these ceased and I
thought she had stopped breathing too; but after a moment came one
final, lingering sigh, and then everything was at an end.
(11)
Francis
Partridge,
diary entry (25th January, 1940)
Spent most of the morning reading Vera Brittain on Winifred Holtby
- frightfully bad, but it aroused various reflections. It is a glorification
of the second-rate and sentimental and reeks of femininity. Why should
woman on woman so painfully lack irony, humour or bite? And it's too
winsome and noble, somehow. But much of that belongs to the First
War, and not to women only. (There it is in Rupert Brooke.) A musty
aroma of danger glamourized and not understood by girls at home floats
out of this book. Vera Brittain writes of the number of women now
happily married and with children who still hark back to a khaki ghost
which stands for the most acute and upsetting feelings they have ever
had in their lives. Which is true I think, and the worst of it is
that the ghost is often almost entirely a creature of their imagination.
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