18 Facts About Winifred Holtby

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

Winifred Holtby's father was David Holtby and her mother, Alice, was afterwards the first alderwoman on the East Riding County Council.

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

Winifred Holtby was, together with Brittain, an ardent feminist, socialist and pacifist.

Winifred Holtby lectured extensively for the League of Nations Union and was a member of the feminist Six Point Group.

Winifred Holtby was active in the Independent Labour Party and was a staunch campaigner for the unionisation of black workers in South Africa, during which she had considerable contact with Leonard Woolf.

Winifred Holtby 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.

Winifred Holtby's doctor gave her only two years to live.

Aware of her impending death, Winifred Holtby put all her remaining energy into what became her most important book, South Riding.

Winifred Holtby never married, though Harry Pearson proposed to her on her deathbed, possibly at the instigation of Vera Brittain.

Winifred 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.

Winifred Holtby wrote a regular weekly column for the trade union magazine The Schoolmistress.

Winifred Holtby wrote poetry, including poems about Vera Brittain's dead brother, Edward.

In Women and a changing civilisation Winifred Holtby linked the 1930s reaction against feminism to a broader "revolt against reason which has affected the intellectual life of the entire Western World".

Winifred Holtby is best remembered for her novel South Riding, edited by Vera Brittain and published posthumously in March 1936, which received high praise from the critics.

Winifred Holtby was buried in All Saints' churchyard in Rudston, East Yorkshire, just yards from the house in which she was born.

Winifred Holtby's epitaph is "God give me work till my life shall end and life till my work is done".

On her death, Winifred Holtby left a small legacy and her own collection of books to a library in the South African township of Soweto, which was opened in December 1940.