Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
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Winifred Holtby
Persephone Books 2008
The Crowded Street, originally published in 1924, is beginning to show its age. The stultifying boredom of unmarried middle-class women’s lives in the first two decades of the twentieth century it depicts has more in common with the world of Jane Austen than it does with today’s society, and it is difficult to believe that the novel was written less than ninety years ago, so much have things changed since. This, though, is no Austenesque social comedy. Instead Holtby’s heroine Muriel eventually rebels against the prevailing wisdom that a woman’s only fulfilment can be marriage. It is a valuable historical document, revealing a world where the ultimate disgrace for a woman was to be an unmarried mother. However, its central theme – the struggle to maintain self-identity in the face of society’s expectations (“the thing that matters is to take your life into your hands and live it”, as Muriel states at the end of the novel) – is still a relevant one today, and the story (mostly) holds the interest, despite the occasional long-windedness, a bit of melodrama, and some circumlocution which was necessary at the time but which now seems very dated. It’s important to remember that Holtby was, after all, breaking new ground. Quite a lot of fiction up to then had presented the theme of search for a husband more or less uncritically after all. As Muriel herself thinks: “All books are the same – about beautiful girls who get married or married women who fall in love with their husbands. … Why doesn’t somebody write a book about someone to whom nothing ever happens?” Holtby’s sympathetic portrayal of just such a woman is one of the strengths of this novel. She also writes of the consequences for those women who “fail” at the game: “It’s all right while you’re young … and there’s always a chance … It’s when you grow older and the people who needed you are dead. And you haven’t a home nor anyone who really wants you …” . Muriel in the end triumphs (each section of the novel is named after a character; significantly it is the final one only which bears her name), as the suffrage movement itself did too at the same time. Novels such as these – and there were a number of them, many like this one originally re-published by Virago in the 1980s – were partly calls to arms and partly accounts of the struggle. I am glad that Persephone has re-discovered it again.
Holtby herself was a close friend of Vera Brittain, and this novel is partly based on that friendship. She died far too early, at the age of 37, and her greatest success, the novel South Riding, was a posthumous one.
3rd February 2009
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jholtby.htm
See also: The Fortnight in September
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