Winifred Holtby: Difference between revisions
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[[Vera Brittain]] subsequently wrote about her friendship with Holtby in her book ''Testament of Friendship'' (1940). A biography of Holtby, entitled ''The Clear Stream'' by Marion Shaw was published in 1999. |
[[Vera Brittain]] subsequently wrote about her friendship with Holtby in her book ''Testament of Friendship'' (1940). A biography of Holtby, entitled ''The Clear Stream'' by Marion Shaw was published in 1999. |
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I am related to her =D |
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==Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize== |
==Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize== |
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Revision as of 14:48, 17 June 2010
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Winifred Holtby (23 June 1898 - 29 September 1935) was an English novelist and journalist, best known for her novel South Riding.
Life and writings
Born to a prosperous farming family in the village of Rudston, Yorkshire (her mother was Alice Holtby, afterwards an alderman on the East Riding County Council[1]). Holtby 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, World War I changed her plans. In early 1918, she joined the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), but soon after she arrived in France, the war came to an end.
In 1919, she returned to Somerville and met Vera Brittain, later to be the author of Testament of Youth, with whom she maintained a lifelong friendship. After graduation from Oxford, in 1921 they moved to London hoping to establish themselves as writers (there is a blue plaque at No. 52 Doughty Street). Holtby's early novels - Anderby Wold (1923), The Crowded Street (1924) (re-published by Persephone Books in 2008) and The Land of Green Ginger (1927) - met with moderate success.
Holtby was also a prolific journalist and, over the next decade and a half, she wrote for more than 20 newspapers and magazines, including the feminist journal Time and Tide and the Manchester Guardian newspaper.
She wrote a regular weekly column for the trade union magazine The Schoolmistress. Her books during this period included a critical study of Virginia Woolf and a volume of short stories, Truth is Not Sober.
Like Brittain, Holtby was an ardent pacifist and lectured extensively for the League of Nations Union. Holtby gradually became more critical of the British class system and by the late 1920s she was active in the Independent Labour Party.
In 1931, Holtby began to suffer from high blood pressure, recurrent headaches and bouts of lassitude. Eventually she was diagnosed as suffering from sclerosis of the kidneys. 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 29 September 1935, aged 37. She never married.
South Riding was published the following year and received high praise from the critics. The book won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1936.
Vera Brittain subsequently wrote about her friendship with Holtby in her book Testament of Friendship (1940). A biography of Holtby, entitled The Clear Stream by Marion Shaw was published in 1999.
I am related to her =D
Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize
In 1967, the Royal Society of Literature instituted the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for the best regional novel of the year. It was replaced in 2003 by the Ondaatje Prize.
References
- ^ South Riding; prefatory letter
Further reading
- Vera Brittain's Testament of Friendship (published in 1940), while also autobiographical, is essentially a biography of Brittain's close colleague and friend, Winifred Holtby.