Review: The Clear Stream – A Life of Winifred Holtby by Marion Shaw

Her pre-war feminist masterpiece South Riding has never been out of print, but Winifred Holtby can nevertheless be considered a criminally undervalued author. Marion Shaw, a professor of English, has done an excellent job of raising awareness for this exemplary woman in her revealing biography The Clear Stream.

Winifred Holtby was the daughter of a well-to-do farmer in Rudston in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Her mother, Alice, was the first woman alderman (a respected office in local politics) in this district, and the character of Mrs Beddows in South Riding is partly based on Holtby's mother. Winifred attended a girls' school whose headmistress she found so fascinating that she immortalised her as Sarah Burton, a determined young lady who strives to educate young women and empower them to "seize the day." Not for Winifred was the conventional married life of her sister Grace, who tragically died in childbirth. Winifred volunteered as an army nurse during the First World War, before going on to Oxford, where she graduated with a degree, and it is here where she met ardent pacifist and fellow-feminist Vera Brittain, with whom she later shared a London flat. Both had decided to become authors, and Holtby not only wrote novels, all of whom feature strong woman protagonists, but also gained a reputation as a journalist. Shaw details the writer's childhood, outlines the diversity of Holtby's writing, which includes poetry as well, scouring it for biographical hints, and describes the pivotal role she played in the groundbreaking feminist magazine Time and Tide. Brittain, for her part, is famous for Testament of Youth, a gripping pacifist memoir describing how difficult it was for women to come to terms with the "Great War", and to become accepted as scholars. Although Winifred, unlike Vera, had not suffered the loss of close friends and relatives in the trenches, she also embraced the pacifist cause.

Gaining the right to vote was not enough for Holtby; apart from her passion for the empowerment of women, she had a strong sense of social justice which brought her into conflict with her mother's views. Alice Holtby was fairly conservative, despite her activity on the council, whereas Winifred developed into a dedicated socialist. Towards the end of her life, she campaigned for the rights of black workers in South Africa, and although the contemporary reader might frown at some of her communist views, we must bear in mind that Holtby lived at a time before the excesses of Stalinism became apparent. All along, her activism was fuelled by a strong desire to improve the living conditions of her fellow human beings.

Holtby's fiction is engrossing, and her journalism fascinating, but the available accounts of her personal life are devoid of the steamy sex, wild behaviour and excesses which "embellish" the biographies of her contemporaries. Apart from one unsatisfactory relationship with a man named Harry Pearson, Winifred's close relationships were with women, including Jean McWilliam, her superior when serving as a nurse, and of course her lifelong companion, Vera Brittain, whose personality was so very different to that of Winifred. Shaw does not make the unacademic mistake, common in conjunction with Vera and Winifred, of interpreting their intimacy as a lesbian relationship, because although Winifred may very likely have been sexually attracted to women, her mother Alice and Vera herself made sure that any condescending letters or references to this taboo subject were suppressed. Testament of Friendship, Vera's memoir of her friend, makes wonderful reading and ought to be consulted as a source on Winifred, but it is too subjective and condescending to provide as comprehensive a picture of our heroine as possible, as Marion Shaw's nicely illustrated biography certainly achieves. Brittain, who had lost close friends, her fiancé, and her brother Edward in the First World War, was a moody, humourless, self-doubting person whose character often clashed with that of Holtby, whom she somewhat cruelly describes as clownish, dowdy, plain and unlucky in her dealings with men. Shaw, however, portrays Winifred as a cheerful, "breezy" contrast to Vera, who in view of the latter's sad background, felt very protective towards her companion, and instilled in her the confidence to become a successful writer. By contrast, in Winifred's novel The Crowded Street, Vera "is the model for Delia, the feminist, new woman citizen of the war and post war years whose example and encouragement inspires the heroine, Muriel, to cast aside the role of stay-at-home spinster for a more public 'idea of service,'" as Shaw writes. There is another famous writer who was unkind in her criticism of Winifred, and that is Virginia Woolf. Interestingly, Holtby was the first person to write a biography of her renowned contemporary. But back to Vera: when, to Winifred's consternation, her friend eventually got married and had a family, the two very different women remained close, and Winifred lovingly cared lovingly for her companion's little boy.

One of the most astonishing facts about Winifred Holtby is her legendary rush to complete her magnificent autobiographical novel South Riding, and complete it she did, knowing all along that she was destined to die a painful death of Bright's disease, a form of kidney failure. South Riding is in a way a feminist variation of George Eliot's Middlemarch, in that it is a superb description of a local community, with its diverse inhabitants, from the visionary headmistress and her gifted schoolgirls to the lonely, impoverished landlord whose wife is in a mental institution, the poor families in the local slum, a sex-starved lay preacher who is being blackmailed by a corrupt politician, and, poignantly reminiscent of Winifred herself, a young woman, who, although she is dying of cancer, does not have the heart to tell her family that her illness and certain death will have disastrous consequences for her husband.

It is to Vera Brittain's credit that out of gratitude for the friend she had so often treated unjustly, she determinedly saw to it that South Riding was published in 1936 following Winifred's untimely and early death, despite the opposition of Holtby's mother Alice, who was embarrassed by the aspects of her personality and work her daughter added to her book character Mrs Beddows.

It is safe to say that Winifred Holtby's line in South Riding: "I was born to be a spinster, and, by God, I'm going to spin," provides ample proof of the fact that this wonderful writer was anything but a conventional soul, but instead an inspiration to generations of women who, thanks to Holtby, suddenly discovered their self-confidence and potential to achieve greatness against all odds.