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INTRODUCTION: ‘A CORPORATE ADVENTURE’

In 1935 Hilda Reid, a friend of Winifred Holtby’s, refl ected on the author’s fi nal article for Good Housekeeping – a review of T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

It is headed Th e Adventure of the Living, a title that might stand above the story of her own life. Only on most lips ‘adventure’ carries a suggestion of solitariness, of self-seeking. Hers was part of a corporate adventure. Th ough she was ‘so good a Protestant as to protest even against Protestantism,’ she did truly believe that we are members of one another.1

Th at Holtby’s sense of adventure was a ‘corporate’ or collective undertaking steers this book’s exploration of what I term Holtby’s social vision and how it develops as a result of her participation in various literary, intellectual and politi-cal networks. Reid’s closing phrase here is a poignant allusion to Holtby’s fi nal novel, South Riding, published posthumously the following year. Th is window onto the aff airs of local government as they transform the landscape of a fi ctional agricultural community in 1930s Yorkshire was to earn Holtby greater acclaim as a novelist and secure her reputation for posterity as a noteworthy writer and intellectual of her day. Regarded as a classic example of the regional novel, South Riding off ers a vision of community solidarity endorsing ‘corporate action’ and appealing strongly to ‘one fundamental truth about human nature – we are not only single individuals, each face to face with eternity and our separate spirits; we are members one of another’.2 When Holtby refers to our sense of being ‘members one of another’, she does so with a profound appreciation of biblical as well as social and political resonances. As will become clear through the course of this book, it is somewhat ironic that Holtby’s social vision should fi nally be expressed through a biblical allusion, given her own diffi culties and criticisms of the church (hinted at by Reid in her portrait of the Protestant who would ‘protest even against Protestantism’). Nevertheless, though the phrase most readily brings to mind the New Testament books of Romans and Ephesians,3 it also indirectly conjures up Galatians which states, ‘Th ere is no room for Jew or Greek, there is no room for slave or freeman, there is no room for male or female:

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you are all one in Christ Jesus’.4 In this light, ‘we are members one of another’ becomes more than simply a call for community solidarity and, moreover, a call for a particular kind of community which corresponds with Holtby’s beliefs in equality, diversity, tolerance and interdependence.

Th is social vision presented in South Riding is one that evolved over a period of years, and I choose to call it a social vision for two reasons. Firstly, a social vision suggests a collection of ideas that is more partial and fl exible than a fully-formed social philosophy or social theory. As Th omas Sowell puts it, a vision ‘is what we sense or feel before we have constructed any systematic reasoning that could be called a theory’.5 And as he explains, ‘Intellectuals do not simply have a series of isolated opinions on a variety of subjects. Behind those opinions is usually some coherent over-arching conception of the world, a social vision’.6 By exploring Holtby’s thoughts and representation of social interaction, social structure and community in this book, I do not present a coherent theory as such, but rather draw out the various infl uences that we see percolating through Holtby’s vision. As a result, in the chapters that follow myriad infl uences emerge in a kaleidoscopic rather than systematic way. Holtby was a thinker of catholic and eclectic tastes, able to synthesize elements from a range of disciplines and political positions. Secondly, Holtby’s writing constantly and self-consciously draws attention to modes of seeing, which has important implications for the realist form and for an ethical outlook that questions imposed homogeneity, as well as the imperialist and patriarchal gaze. In plotting the evolution of this social vision here in this book, I undertake a journey through Holtby’s oeuvre that maps the various infl uences on her development as a writer and thinker, and how those infl uences generate an interplay of literary genre that envisions and re-envisions community from the local to the international level.

When Holtby refers to a community being ‘members one of another’, she does so from the position of someone whose membership was not always guaran-teed and who remains cautious about whether membership comes at the cost of individual expression. It is Raymond Williams who reminds us about the valence such terminology carries. ‘Th e member of society feels himself to belong to it, in an essential way; its values are his values’ and ‘it is the essence of membership that the individual, so far from feeling that the society is opposed to him, looks upon it as the natural means by which his own purposes will be forwarded’.7 Member-ship to one society does not ensure membership to all, and as Williams explains, membership in one society may render an individual a servant, subject, rebel, exile or vagrant in relation to other forms of social experience depending on the extent to which the individual is oppressed or able to reject society.8 Like many of us, Holtby was to spend her life moving between diff erent kinds of communi-ties, and these transitions brought her experiences of belonging and exclusion, proximity and distance, as well as possession and loss, all of which speak strongly

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to the changing aspects of community during the interwar decades during which traditional ways of life buckled under social and political upheaval while new nationalist ideologies took hold as empires expanded and contracted.

From Yorkshire to LondonBorn in 1898 into a rural community in the East Riding of Yorkshire, Holtby was the youngest daughter of David and Alice Holtby and grew up on a farm in the village of Rudston. Her parents were well-respected pillars of the com-munity: her father, a prosperous farmer also became a school manager and her mother later became a prominent fi gure in local politics.9 Th e Holtby residence, Rudston House, lay at the heart of village life, and growing up in a household staunchly faithful to a feudal sense of social responsibility had a lasting impact on Holtby. As Holtby’s biographer, Marion Shaw, highlights, ‘Her relationship with her father’s workers and their families taught her social awareness and grati-tude and even guilt at her own privileged position’ – a formative experience that would shape her criticism of this rural community as well as her nostalgia for it, and later steer her towards political activism.10

Despite her lifelong affi nity for the East Riding, there are numerous examples throughout her work, particularly in her early novels, which recognize that this is not the community in which she would reach her full potential. And Holtby was to admit as much in a letter to Sarah Gertrude Millin in the early 1930s:

I too was brought up among middle-class and completely unintellectual people on a Yorkshire farm. Had a sympathetic schoolmistress not persuaded my parents to send me to college, I should never have left that environment, of animals, seasons, shoot-ing parties, the visits of foremen and pig dealers, of millers and their wives. Even now, quite half my life is there, and all my ‘roots’. Th ere ‘art’ is something as unimportant and incomprehensible as the algebraic implications of the Koran.11

Th ough initially schooled at home by a governess, Holtby went to Queen Margaret’s School in 1909. Here, she found her interests in reading and writ-ing encouraged by the schoolmistress she refers to above, which also seems to have secured her mother’s support for Holtby’s literary pursuits, evident in Alice Holtby’s decision to privately publish her daughter’s juvenilia in 1911 as My Garden and Other Poems.12 With this support for her education, uncommon for girls of her community at that time, Holtby would fi nally leave Yorkshire to enter Somerville College, Oxford, to read Modern History in 1917.

But Holtby was soon drawn away from her studies by her strong social conscience to play her part in the war eff ort that would defi ne her generation. She joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps as a private the following year and was posted as a hostel forewoman to serve in France at a signals unit near Abbeville. Th rough such service she was to fi nd herself amongst a community

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of like-minded women, where she was to form an enduring friendship with her administrator, Jean McWilliam. Th e many letters she wrote to McWilliam are preserved in the volume Letters to a Friend (1937), and a series of unpublished stories called ‘Th e Forest Unit’ (inspired by Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden in As You Like It) also stands as testament to how rewarding and liberating Holtby found her war service.13 ‘I yielded to desire to join the WAAC’, she admitted to Vera Brittain (whose own war experience as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse recorded in Testament of Youth (1933) had been vastly diff erent) and ‘it had never occurred to me that Army life was anything but a fortunate privilege’.14

Returning home in 1919, Holtby was to discover a changed landscape. Back in Yorkshire, the post-war agricultural depression had forced her family to sell up the farm at Rudston and move into Cottingham, a suburb of Hull. Th e transition from this rural community of her childhood to the urban space of Cottingham underpins much of that nostalgic sense of place that character-izes her fi rst novel, Anderby Wold. Where one community was lost, however, another opened up elsewhere as new opportunities sprang up for women in edu-cation and the professions aft er the war. Holtby became one of the fi rst women to graduate from Oxford University in 1921, where she struck up a life-long and professionally-enabling friendship with Vera Brittain, a friendship commemo-rated in Brittain’s biography of Holtby, Testament of Friendship (1940). Th is was a friendship which on the one hand helped Holtby to gain entry into a London community of writers and intellectuals – the two initially began to earn their money as teachers and lecturers for the League of Nations Union and feminist organizations – though on the other hand it also potentially jeopardized her acceptance into a wider community.

Her ‘marvellous friendship’ with Brittain has been the focus of much schol-arly interest in Holtby.15 Speculations about the nature of the friendship which had circulated at the time, and which Holtby dismissed lightheartedly as ‘Too, too Chelsea’, 16 have also preoccupied contemporary scholars seeking to reclaim Holtby for a lesbian history of the interwar period.17 Th e present study does not add to these debates and rather accepts Marion Shaw’s pluralist approach both to the friendship and Holtby’s sexuality.18 But I remain mindful nonetheless of how such rumours about Holtby’s friendship and indeed her own singleness, in particular her self-defi ned status as a spinster, had some bearing on her social vision and her own consciousness of how women such as herself frequently found themselves pushed to the periphery. Such consciousness perhaps accounts for that sensitivity throughout her work towards the socially marginalized and those people for whom membership seems precarious because they do not, or cannot, conform. In Women and a Changing Civilisation, for example, Holtby observes the cultural pressure exerted on women to become wives and mothers and the stigma attached to those who do not comply. Supported as it was by eugenicist

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and psychological discourse, ‘Th e legend of the Frustrated Spinster’, she tells us ‘is one of the most formidable social infl uences of the modern world’.19 And it is ‘the pervasive and penetrating infl uence of opinion’ that forces these women to doubt themselves even when they fi nd they are satisfi ed by their work, friends and family life.20 Th is is why Jean Stanbury, one of Holtby’s most self-assured single, profes-sional characters, suddenly admits, ‘[If ] there were a lot of people here, I doubt if I would have the moral courage to say anything but that I was utterly riddled with complexes and was trying to sublimate my maternal instincts on offi ces’.21 And it was social insights of this kind that prompted Holtby to make quite a radical remark towards the end of Women and a Changing Civilisation:

We do not know how much of what we usually describe as ‘feminine characteris-tics’ are really ‘masculine’ and how much ‘masculinity’ is common to both sexes. Our hazards are oft en wildly off the mark. We do not even know – though we theorize and penalize with ferocious confi dence – whether the ‘normal’ sexual relationship is homo- or bi- or hetero-sexual. We are content to make vast generalisations which quite oft en fi t the facts enough to be tolerable, but which – also quite oft en – infl ict indescribable because indefi nable suff ering on those individuals who cannot without pain conform to our rough and ready attempt to make all men good and happy.

It seems possible that in a wiser world we should walk more delicately. We might, perhaps, consider individuals as individuals, not primarily as members of this or that race, sex and status. We might be content to love the individual, perceiving in him or her a spirit which is divine as well as human and which has little to do with the accident of the body.22

Here, individual expression, lauded over the position as ‘members of this or that race, sex, and status’, becomes the basis for a more fl exible and freer attitude to gender identity and sexuality. It is interesting to note some of the responses to this statement about the ‘accident of the body’ and what that reveals about Holtby’s own reception within society. Anthony M. Ludovici, a proto-fascist and eugenicist thinker noted for his diatribes against the spinster, remained true to form in his denunciation of Holtby’s book,23 while the radical, egalitarian feminist journal, Urania held Holtby in high esteem as a radical opponent of heterosexual hegemony and a paladin of gay and transgender politics.24

Contemporary responses such as these indicate why much Holtby schol-arship has served to locate Holtby within feminist and literary communities and in opposition to ideals of heterosexual hegemony. Both Jean Kennard and Diana Wallace have traced the development of Holtby’s heroines towards feminist autonomy through literary dialogues with Vera Brittain’s writing: Ken-nard through a process of mirroring and self-defi nition, and Wallace through a Bakhtinian reading of ‘competitive dialogue’ which has been key to a fuller and more realistic understanding of women’s friendships.25 Holtby’s sustained defence of the ‘frustrated spinster’ in her fi ction and non-fi ction has also pro-

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duced numerous readings of her work which identify its unusual challenges to the dictates of the marriage plot.26 Th ese approaches oft en share an interest in reading Holtby’s work in conversation either with Brittain or other like-minded feminists repudiating anti-spinster discourses. Th is focus is extended in Marion Shaw’s ‘prismatic’ biography of Holtby, Th e Clear Stream, which looks beyond her friendship with Brittain to off er a fuller, more comprehensive portrait than hitherto of a writer and campaigner working alongside many key political and culture fi gures of the period.27 Such an approach reveals how the friendship with Brittain facilitated entry into a professional community, and this is supported by Catherine Clay’s research into the web of friendship around the feminist weekly, Time and Tide, which demonstrates precisely how Holtby and Brittain’s choice to live in Doughty Street in the early 1920s placed the two aspiring writ-ers within a thriving literary and political milieu. Th is previous work has been crucial to advancing our understanding of Holtby’s relationships with contem-porary writers and activists, and particularly in recognizing the importance of Time and Tide to Holtby’s professional development.

Holtby was to have her fi rst article accepted by Time and Tide in 1924 – a comment on social disparities and education, entitled ‘Th e Human Factor’ – this brought her to the attention of the paper’s founder, Lady Margaret Rhondda, an ex-suff ragette and peeress.28 As Lady Rhondda refl ected in 1935, “[D]irectly I read that article I knew that here was someone who counted and whom I must at once get hold of.”29 Rhondda’s instincts were right, and Holtby grew to promi-nence as a highly acclaimed journalist, writing for a range of political weeklies, national and regional newspapers and magazines, including the Manchester Guardian, the Schoolmistress, the Radio Times and Good Housekeeping. In 1926 she became a director for Time and Tide, and it was in this role at Rhondda’s side that Holtby worked at the centre of one of the signifi cant political and literary networks of interwar London.

Aft er it was founded in 1920 Time and Tide quickly provided the impetus for establishing a egalitarian feminist organization called Th e Six Point Group, which Holtby and Brittain both joined in 1922.30 Holtby’s feminism, fi rst initiated through her friendship with Brittain at Oxford, became a life-long commitment through her work for Th e Six Point Group and another feminist organization, Th e Open Door Council, which also placed women’s economic and political equality at the top of its agenda. Indeed, Holtby’s commitment to the cause was made clear in a public defence of ‘Old Feminism’ or equality feminism in 1926 published in Time and Tide. Th is was a reply to an article commending the so-called ‘New Feminism’ headed by Eleanor Rathbone, which realigned the priorities of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizen-ship (NUSEC) away from egalitarian calls for equal work for equal pay to more specifi cally woman-centred policies of birth control, family endowment and

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protective legislation.31 With its single focus and stress on cooperation rather than division between the sexes, Holtby justifi ed the continued eff orts of ‘Equal-ity First’ feminists like herself:

Th e Old Feminists have also looked ahead, beyond the achievement of the reforms for which they are now working. Th ey also have their vision of society, a society in which sex-diff erentiation concerns those things alone by which the physical laws of nature it must govern, a society in which men and women work together for the good of all mankind; a society in which there is no respect of persons, either male or female, but a supreme regard for the importance of the human being. And when that dream is a reality, they will say farewell to feminism, as to a disbanded but victorious army, with honour for its heroes, gratitude for its sacrifi ce, and profound relief that the hour for its necessity has passed.32

Th e vision presented here manifests that diffi culty within feminism to negotiate the equality–diff erence dilemma. Holtby cannot dispense with ‘sex diff erentia-tion’ entirely in the way that Julia Kristeva is later able to foresee a third generation of feminism where gender identity becomes fl uid and unfi xed.33 As Denise Riley has observed, ‘Th e impasse for feminism in the 1920s and 1930s was acute … Th e result was a nervous hesitation between “equality” and “diff erence”, or a search for the fragile meridian position which saw women as “diff erent but equal”’.34 Although Holtby appears to steer away from any middle-position of equivalence here, her position is strategically exaggerated in this article. Holtby was certainly not opposed to ‘New Feminism’ on all fronts and, unlike some of her egalitarian colleagues, supported birth control and motherhood endowment. Her article might be better considered in light of Joan W. Scott’s deconstructive approach to the equality–diff erence debate, which argues that historically feminist argu-ments do not fall neatly into the categories of equality and diff erence, and oft en highlight rather than solve contradictions.35 Holtby’s reassertion of the egalitar-ian stance in this article certainly works to highlight the inherent contradiction in ‘New Feminism’s’ attitude to progress. As Holtby clarifi es, the ‘New Feminists’ assumed the striving for equality to be won with the partial vote in 1918 and the 1919 Sex Disqualifi cation (Removal) Act, but they overlooked that many women did not yet have the vote (Holtby herself for one, writing as a single female non-property owner) not only in Britain but also throughout the world.

Holtby wrote her ‘Feminism Divided’ article at a crucial moment in her career following a six-month lecture tour of South Africa for the League of Nations Union. Having ‘just returned from South Africa, where women have no vote for members of the Legislative Assembly’ and ‘followed the policy of the Interna-tional Labour Organization with regard to “protective” legislation for women workers’, Holtby contradicts the anglocentric assumptions of ‘New Feminism’ that gender equality is a foregone conclusion.36 Th is article makes a strong case for British feminism to see its work as contributing to an international community of

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‘all mankind’ and to recognize a global community of women. And the overrid-ing message of this article is for British feminism to look to those left behind by progress, or, as Holtby was to phrase it elsewhere, to ‘Bring up [its] rears’.37

Between London and AfricaArriving back home in July 1926, Holtby wrote to Vera Brittain, ‘Back in Lon-don I feel as though I have been buried in the provinces, and so I have; but provinces 600 miles away and 300 years backwards (if Olive Schreiner spoke the truth. And I am more than ever amazed by her genius since visiting Africa. She saw).’38 Th ere is something of the typical imperialist traveller here in Holtby’s account where time and space have been elided: to travel to the empire is also to travel back in time. Notably, the empire is also equated to the provinces, so that both the provincial and imperial spaces become chronotopes. But what Holtby brings back with her from her adventure is actually a new mode of seeing which in fact counters the imperialist separation of metropole and its distant territories by deliberately merging and connecting Britain and Africa, and which seems to be infl uenced by Olive Schreiner as a 1926 review of Schreiner’s posthumously published From Man to Man suggests.

In her review of Schreiner’s novel, Holtby identifi es Schreiner as ‘one of the profoundly original thinkers of modern times’.39 What she fi nds so ‘modern’ about Schreiner’s thought is its insistence on connection and interdependence. From Man to Man, or Perhaps So, though left unfi nished, nevertheless seems to provide a coda to the whole of Schreiner’s oeuvre for Holtby; its philosophizing on human relations and its emphasis on Herbert Spencer’s materialist concept of unity and interconnection are key for Holtby. Th e title of the review, ‘Bring up your Rears!’ is taken from Rebekah’s philosophical refl ections on progress and human relations in the novel, at the moment when she questions whether

the true cry of permanent human advance must always be ‘Bring up your rears! Bring up your rears’? Head and heart can ultimately move no farther than the feet can carry them. Permanent human advance must be united advance!40

Th at Holtby should have been interested in this revision of progress as a col-lective advance is telling, particularly in light of her unpublished novel, Th e Runners. Th is medieval biographical-romance, begun before her trip to South Africa, was centred on the fourteenth-century priest, Wyclif. A heretic who challenged central tenets of the Catholic faith such as transubstantiation and priestly abstinence, Wyclif was, for Holtby, one of the forward-thinking bear-ers of progress, one of the ‘runners’ as she terms it. Yet by the end of the novel, Wyclif is less idealistic about his status as a ‘runner’. His pursuit of truth has come at a cost; he has turned away from Alice, the woman he loved, to fulfi l his

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vocation, and in his quest to defy ecclesiastic and secular tyranny, he neglects to save Alice’s son, who is hanged for his part in the peasant revolt. Wyclif real-izes that he runs at the vanguard of progress while others suff er in his wake and that those like himself who ‘were deaf to the voices of those they left behind, blind to pity, untrammelled, swift … are the Runners’.41 Rebekah’s insistence that ‘[p]ermanent human advance must be united advance’ therefore chimes with Holtby’s existing preoccupation with progress and its consequences both in Th e Runners and also in her fi rst novel Anderby Wold.

According to Holtby, Schreiner leaves the heritage of her social philosophy to Rebekah, for whom ethic and moral considerations lie not in the expedi-ency of social convention but in a truth divined through universal connection: ‘She fi nds the key to this in the unity of creation, revealed by science, which has destroyed irrelevance in a world where we are all members of one another, and where, consequently, no individual can attain to full perfection until his brethren share his opportunities’.42 Th is is where we fi nd an early formulation of Holtby’s social vision articulated through that variation on ‘members one of another’. It takes on board Schreiner’s repudiation of Social Darwinism and individualism in favour of connection and the collective, or as Rebekah phrases it, ‘Th e supreme moment to me is not when I kill or conquer a living thing, but that moment its eye and mine meet and a line of connection is formed between me and the life that is in it’.43 In From Man to Man survival and evolu-tion are not predicated on the destruction of the weaker by the stronger but on devotion and union between the strong and weak, and it is this attempt to overcome inequality which speaks to Holtby’s sense of progress through shared social responsibility. ‘Here for her [Schreiner] lies the ultimate condition of progress, here the connection on her Th oughts on South Afr ica, her allegories like Th e Sunshine Lay, and Woman and Labour’, Holtby tells us, so that ‘While half humanity, whether of the “inferior” sex or the “inferior” race, is deprived of opportunity for development, it endangers the whole progress of civilization’.44 Importantly, Schreiner’s novel consolidates Holtby’s emergent concerns about progress, while at the same time inspiring her to use her experiences in South Africa to develop her own social vision, one culminating in that vision of com-munity in South Riding. More immediately, however, it alters her perspective on the political communities to which she returns and heralds a new phase of activ-ism in Holtby’s life which joins her previous commitments to eradicating class and gender disparities with the fi ght for racial equality.

Th is extension of her egalitarian convictions to encompass race brought increased involvement with socialist organizations, as a means of contesting imperialist policy at home and assisting black South Africans to overcome the injustices of national policy in the Dominion. Holtby and Brittain had joined the Labour Party around 1925: a move which Alan Bishop suggests was spurred

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on by what they had learnt about the slums of Bethnal Green working for the Liberal candidate for that seat, Percy Harris, in the early 1920s.45 It seems Brit-tain was originally off ered the role of secretary to Percy Harris in 1922, but she was unable to manage it alongside other commitments and so Holtby took up the position.46 Holtby’s notebooks at this time indicate the strong and lasting impression this experience had upon her understanding of poverty and its partic-ular impact on education. An interview with a teacher at Bethnal Green School records the teacher’s confession that ‘it’s dreadfully depressing. Of course, we get to love them the poor little mites. Th ere’s Susan – 14 – mother drinks and is a bad lot. Th ree tubercular children. Susan the eldest looks aft er them’.47 In the initial instance, these notes provided the basis for Holtby’s fi rst Time and Tide article, ‘Th e Human Factor’, which puts forward a case against reducing teaching staff and a case for allowing headteachers more fl exibility in order to deal with the vagaries of life experienced by working-class children. Without such measures, Holtby suggests, a lamentable fall in the numbers of children attending schools in poorer districts like Bethnal Green will follow.48 It is not diffi cult to see how Holtby’s glimpse of working-class life here also informed the later portrait of the Holly family in South Riding, but it also seems to have heightened her sensitiv-ity to such deprivation even in unfamiliar contexts, as her reports back from South Africa reveal. Johannesburg, she notes, is a place ‘where one eats marvel-lous dishes handed by bare-foot black waiters in white gloves’ and where ‘[t]here are common lodging houses of indescribable corruption, where men die of pthisis [sic] among the drunken brawling of their fellow lodgers’.49 Holtby’s com-mitment to socialism intensifi ed on her return from South Africa. She would canvass for the Labour candidate Monica Whately in the 1929 General Election, and then again in 1931 when she would also support other Labour candidates, Charles Roden Buxton and George Catlin. And though A New Voter’s Guide to Party Programmes (1929) was intended to off er impartial advice for new vot-ers through a series of dialogues, the pamphlet is nevertheless subtly weighted towards Holtby’s left -leaning politics, for while it remains critical of all parties, it is, as Jean Kennard points out, least critical of Labour.50 By this time Holtby had also became closely connected to the more radical Independent Labour Party (ILP) through her contact with Trade Unionists and her eff orts to garner British Labour support for black trade unionism in South Africa.

But, despite her unfailing support for equal rights in the colonies and at home in Britain, Holtby was not a revolutionary social and political thinker. While she wrote about the breach of rights in the Native Bills and 1926 Col-our Bar Act in the British press, her work amongst black South Africans was to avert anticipated communist revolution amongst black trade unionists.51 ‘Now Communism with Bertrand Russell means one thing’, she was to write to Brit-tain from South Africa, ‘but this particular brand of Communism, undiluted,

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and super-imposed upon a peculiar ignorance of history or economics, is quite another’.52 Her own political outlook, never strictly Marxist or radical, has been usefully contextualized within the tradition of English ethical socialism by Nat-tie Golubov, who sees it informing South Riding, while Kristin Ewins argues that Holtby’s socialism enables the trenchant analysis of capitalist exploita-tion of Africa in Mandoa, Mandoa!53 By the early 1930s Holtby had become a member of the ILP, and certainly her increasing involvement with this more forward-thinking section of the left wing on issues of imperialism and colonial-ism infl uenced her novels Poor Caroline (1931) and Mandoa, Mandoa! (1933) in which protagonists turn from their privileged upbringing towards socialism and its associated internationalist standpoint.

It is through such characters that Holtby strategically closes down cultural diff erences, as she was to do in her own journalism and polemical writing. Women and a Changing Civilisation, for example, makes provocative compari-sons between gender and race oppression by setting up parallels between Europe and South Africa:

One can hear to-day on verandahs of South African houses snatches of talk uncannily familiar: ‘Th e native has not the same obligations. His standard of life is lower. Th e native is only a child. He must be protected from political, or economic, or, as the case may be, social responsibility. Th is is no country for a White man.’ Or, ‘At least it’s a white man’s job.’ Substitute ‘woman’ for ‘native,’ remove the ‘white before ‘man,’ and the remarks fall into their habitual European character. Th e fear, the resulting contempt and mutual resentment are the same.54

Th e eff ect of this passage is to make the analogy work in both directions: it is not possible to see the discrimination and injustice in South Africa without rec-ognizing its European counterpart and vice-versa. Holtby’s feminist reader, if indignant at arguments against women’s right to citizenship must therefore rec-ognize that such indignation is also merited by the injustices against black South Africans. Recent approaches to Holtby explore the analogies she was to make between gender and race oppression. Susan Pedersen, discussing Holtby in the context of modern trusteeship and shift s in imperial power between the wars, fi nds her remarkable for her ability to denaturalize white privilege and to sym-pathize with both the men and women of colonized countries. As Pedersen puts it, ‘Holtby, in other words, used feminism as a resource to gain some imaginative insight into what it might feel like to be black’.55

In Women and a Changing Civilisation Holtby uses these insights to formulate her critique of fascism which also emerges strongly in her journalism at this time. By tracing women’s progress from ancient cultures through to the contemporary 1930s, she arrives at the conclusion that gender and race oppression spring from primitive fears of diff erence, competition and inferiority, and it is these fears which drive fascist ideology and upon which it plays to gain support. As she queries:

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Are they part of that natural exclusiveness which from time to time leads groups of individuals – a class, a nation, a race – to deny full humanity to all those who do not comply with an arbitrary set of qualifi cations – which makes the white settler in Kenya incredulous of the humanity of the Kikuyu, or the Aryan German disinclined to accept the humanity of a Jew? Or does sex-confl ict derive from something more fundamental?56

As the 1930s progressed, Holtby became increasingly sensitive to how these questions about racial and gender equality were integral to combating mounting doubts about democracy in the context of economic depression and to contest-ing the rising popularity of fascist leaders within Europe.

Th e Reformer, the Writer and the MiddlebrowHoltby’s commitment to social change and her participation in various net-works of political activists, while it secured her membership to various societies, also seemed, in her own mind at least, to compromise her membership to a spe-cifi cally literary milieu. Committed to so many causes, Holtby frequently felt torn between her literary and political passions. ‘I still shall never quite make up my mind whether to be a reformer-sort-of-person or a writer-sort-of-person’, she had once confessed to Rhondda.57 Th is tension in her life and writing oft en led her to doubt the quality of her literary output. Th ough Rhondda oft en sus-pected that Holtby was a better journalist and short-story writer than novelist – and told her so on occasions58 – she was nevertheless to identify Holtby as ‘an artist’ who ‘saw life steadily and saw it whole’, the allusion to Matthew Arnold succinctly conveying Holtby’s liberal humanist conviction that the author’s duty is to instruct and guide the reader, as well as entertain.59 But whether Arnold would have included Holtby’s works within that class of literature lauded by him as the leading light of civilization is another matter. Holtby’s determination to see ‘life whole’ departs from his loft y conception of the writer coalescing diff er-ent modes of knowledge. Rather it emanates from a more practical and grounded focus on lived realities and social relationships across diff erent communities, an aspect of her vision which perhaps explains her commitment to the realist novel over other literary forms as the genre most fi t to detail those shift ing connections between individuals that constitute the very social fabric of communal life.

‘Most novels are in some sense knowable communities’, Raymond Williams tells us, ‘part of a traditional method – an underlying stance and approach – that the novelist off ers to show people and their relationships in essentially know-able and communicable ways’.60 Th e novel’s success as a method lies in its ability to reaffi rm shared values and a shared perspective, an ability which rests on the social confi dence that the community described is already known both to reader and author. But, Williams elaborates, as the nineteenth century progressed this

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confi dence articulated by the realist novel was shaken in two important ways: fi rstly, doubt was cast over whether the individual was wholly knowable through his or her interactions with the community, and secondly, there was a widening schism between ‘knowable communities’ as formed through local relations and the larger society which governed individuals’ lives from afar.61 Holtby’s fi ction, as I argue throughout this book, can be read as a continuation of nineteenth-century realism and, importantly, as a development of this growing tendency to question assumptions about the individual and his/her place within a range of diff erent, oft en competing communities.

Questions over whether we can know the individual prior to social interac-tion or whether the individual can even know himself or herself are more oft en associated with modernist writing in this period, where the individual becomes a protean self that shift s with diff erent social situations and presents surprising, contradictory and partial thoughts in his or her internal monologue. Moreo-ver, modernist fi ction’s focus on interiority and alienation oft en reveals how the individual’s ability to connect with others in a meaningful way is jeopardized by his or her own unknowableness. In his analysis of modernism, Williams sug-gests that critics must look beyond the established modernist canon if they are to uncover a sustained commitment to writing and to presenting the ‘knowable community’ aft er the First World War. ‘[W]e must search out and counterpose an alternative tradition taken from neglected works left in the wide margin of the century, a tradition which may address itself ’, he suggests, ‘to a modern future in which community may be imagined again’.62

What exactly Williams means by this might be answered with reference to the wide swathes of popular fi ction which fi lled the shelves of lending libraries between the wars: fi ction that, as Faye Hammill usefully maps out, lay at the very centre of interwar culture, but which has been relegated to the margin by modern literary scholarship.63 Certainly, Holtby was aware of how her novels appealed to this central mass of readers, what she called ‘that great intermediate class of “the novel reading public”’.64 References to ‘Ruby M. Ayres, Pamela Wynne and Ursula Bloom’ in South Riding nod to the reader that the author knows the other writers alongside whom she is read.65 Th is also acknowledges that the author’s work belongs to what she was to call elsewhere ‘a large and every increasing body of competent fi ction’, diff erentiated both from the highbrow avant-garde works of writers such as T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf and from the lowbrow liter-ary market of paperbacks and novelettes (which included romances, wild West, Foreign Legion and gangster stories).66 Th ough Holtby would never apply the term herself, her writing invites inclusion within that space of cultural production designated as the ‘middlebrow’ (a term in use aft er 1925), which was to gener-ate vast quantities of bestselling or popular fi ction derided by the cultural elite. Q.D. Leavis distinguished such novels, with their ‘commonplaces of observation

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and reassuring sentiment’, from their highbrow counterparts by their tendency to ‘betray either a faked sensibility or else a suggestive insensitiveness to the life around them, a lack of discrimination and a second-rate mind’.67 Leavis’s scathing remarks on this body of so-called ‘second-rate’ fi ction were matched by others, most famously perhaps by Virginia Woolf, who was to deride the middlebrow as ‘betwixt and between’ (neither of highbrow intellectualism nor lowbrow vitality) in her unpublished letter to the New Statesman of 1929.68

Even without knowing the content of Woolf ’s unpublished letter, Holtby was, in eff ect, to answer some of these charges against middlebrow fi ction when she came to write the fi rst critical appraisal of Woolf in English. As though in pro-ductive dialogue with this other author ‘whose experience was most alien to [her] own’, Holtby proceeds to consolidate and crystallize her views on the art and role of fi ction in Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir.69 Where Woolf had disparaged Edwardian novels for not being ends in themselves in her essay on ‘Modern Fic-tion’ (1919), Holtby asserts that a novel’s orientation towards a social and political cause did not compromise its literary status. ‘In order to complete them it seems necessary to do something’, Woolf had lamented ‘– to join a Society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque’,70 to which Holtby reassuringly responds, ‘A work of art is not destroyed because its secondary infl uence upon those who encounter it is moral and persuasive’.71 Indeed, as I demonstrate through the course of this book, it seems Holtby lays great store on her own fi ction’s ability to be ‘moral and persuasive’. Holtby also defends the materialists – Arnold Bennett, John Galswor-thy and H. G. Wells – scorned by Woolf for their failure to capture the essence of life. In so doing, she vindicates the Edwardians, and by association her own milieu’s, continuity with the nineteenth-century realist novel.

As Holtby’s defence and as recent studies on the middlebrow make clear, ‘Th e “middlebrow novel”, therefore, is not a newly emerging literary form in the 1920s, but a critical term emerging as a consequence of contemporary literary developments’, namely modernist innovation and its recalibration of cultural authority.72 Certainly, as I highlight at various points in the chapters that follow, Holtby’s novels deliberately hark back to nineteenth-century realist precursors. But Holtby’s novels also exemplify that hallmark of the middlebrow, revealed by groundbreaking surveys of twentieth-century women’s fi ction, to act as a barometer for social, cultural and even political change regardless of its adher-ence to seemingly antiquated narrative modes.73 As Alison Light argues, the middlebrow represents a literary and cultural site of what she calls ‘conservative modernity’: a ‘Janus-faced’ tension in English social life aft er the Great War able to ‘look backwards and forwards’ and ‘accommodate the past in the new forms of the present; it was a deferral of modernity and yet it also demanded a diff erent sort of conservatism from that which had gone before’.74 For Light, this ‘con-servative modernity’ is specifi cally gendered and associated with a maligned and

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inferior feminine and feminized domestic culture readily represented in wom-en’s writing. Nicola Humble has furthered this gendered reading in her study of the ‘feminine middlebrow’, in which she fi nds common concerns associated with shift ing gender roles and changing conceptions of family and domestic space, and argues that the ‘feminine middlebrow’ as a ‘hybrid form’ had ‘a signifi cant role in the negotiation of new class and gender identities’.75 Indeed, it is the elas-ticity and composite nature of the middlebrow, as Melissa Sullivan and Sophie Blanch stress, which has encouraged scholarship to fl ourish in this fi eld. As they rightly insist, ‘[T]he hybridity of the middlebrow is not mimicry of the high-brow, but a sophisticated integration of a range of cultural practices in order to provide an entertaining and intellectual understanding of modernity’.76

Holtby’s novels undoubtedly advance this understanding of modernity in the interwar period and integral to this is how her writing addresses the question of how to knit individuals together into recognizable communities: a feature of the middlebrow which Rosa Maria Bracco juxtaposes with modernist represen-tations of alienated, fragmented, oft en urbanized and cosmopolitan individual subjectivity. For Bracco, the middlebrow is a typically ‘English’ genre, intent on reaffi rming a crumbling sense of regional and national identity in the aft ermath of the First World War. Inverting Yeats’s ‘the centre cannot hold’, Bracco argues that the middlebrow symbolized a centre that did hold precisely because its novel-ists demonstrated ‘a commitment to avoid the fragmentation of what they saw in “English” culture’.77 But Bracco’s analysis is weighted towards male writers return-ing from the Great War, and as this book will highlight, responses to this sense of national consolidation were sometimes split along gendered lines. South Rid-ing, subtitled ‘An English Landscape’ with an epigraph from Vita Sackville-West’s Georgian pastoral poem ‘Th e Land’, would seem to gesture to this literary con-solidation of Englishness and regional celebration – an appeal to national culture certainly refl ected in the opening idyllic scenes of rural life and the fi nal rousing chorus of ‘Hope and Glory’ in Victor Saville’s 1938 fi lm adaptation of the novel.78

Yet, as I aim to demonstrate here, to read Holtby’s middlebrow novels as sim-ply reaffi rming national values occludes many of their more challenging aspects both in terms of content and form. Th roughout Holtby’s fi ction, we fi nd her heroines adopting an expansive and more cosmopolitan perspective that runs counter to that turn inwards to the national space exhibited by male characters. In this sense, I argue, Holtby’s middlebrow novel oft en adopts an outward-look-ing gaze that destabilizes rather than consolidates national culture and national boundaries, and moreover, destabilizes the dichotomy between modernist fragmentation and middlebrow consolidation. In this I am mindful of critical explorations of modernist writing in the context of community and culture, such as Jessica Berman’s study of cosmopolitanism and Jed Esty’s focus on Anglocen-trism in late modernism.79 And Holtby too was alert to the ways some highbrow

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writers displayed concerns about community even when others did not. As she was to remark on Virginia Woolf, ‘[Her] vision is intensely individual; but her philosophy is not wholly individualistic’.80 Indeed, throughout Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir Holtby is attentive to Woolf ’s prevailing concerns with unity, picking out instances of Romantic unity between the human and non-human, as well as unity across gender division, and seems particularly struck by Woolf ’s ability to reveal the ephemeral and contingent interconnections of the urban community in novels such as Mrs Dalloway: ‘[t]he unity which bound Clarissa to Septimus Warren Smith, making her feel that in some way his death was her death, his disgrace her disgrace, his escape a gift to her, is a philosophic unity’.81 Holtby’s reading of Woolf therefore signals moments of convergence between the middlebrow and modernist writer on questions of the community and the individual that were already apparent in her fi ction. Poor Caroline, for exam-ple, seems to emulate Mrs Dalloway’s ‘philosophic unity’ when the young Father Mortimer refl ects on the coincidental connections of city life: ‘“We are so oddly interrelated,” he thought. “We are members one of another. An inescapable com-munion. We cannot avoid incurring responsibility for our brethren”.’82

Even before her study of Woolf, however, Holtby’s middlebrow realist novels revealed more experimental strategies to explore the individual’s membership within various communities. Th e Land of Green Ginger (1927), despite being a regional novel, represents its Yorkshire community not in ‘knowable’ terms but through an alienated perspective of the South African orphan, Joanna. Dream-like sequences and an uncharacteristically frequent use of free indirect discourse in this novel underscore just how disconnected Joanna, her husband and their Hungarian lodger are from the local community. By drawing attention to these features of Holtby’s realism, it is possible to trouble assumptions about the middlebrow novel’s formal conservatism and conservative consolidation of com-munity. Recent readings of Rumer Godden’s work have, for example, revealed a similar experimental realism,83 while other writers similarly retain a commit-ment to people over art in ways which Kristin Bluemel describes as ‘radically eccentric’.84 For Bluemel, this sustained commitment to cultural and political features in ‘a kind of writing’ utilizing popular forms creates ‘a social formation’ and a site of ‘shared values’, which she has coined intermodernism.85 Bluemel numbers Holtby, as well as Holtby’s friends and colleagues (Stella Benson, Vera Brittain, E. M. Delafi eld, Naomi Mitchison and Rebecca West) amongst these intermodernist eccentrics.86 Certainly Patsy Stoneman and Gill Frith have opened up new ways of reading Holtby’s realism which reveal its experimental notes. For Frith, Th e Land of Green Ginger is an example of Holtby’s ‘utopian realism’, whilst Stoneman’s reading of South Riding in light of Donna Haraway’s theory of partial and ‘situated knowledges’ is able to detect Holtby’s discomfort with the role of the omniscient narrator.87 Such a reading opens up the possi-

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bility of seeing Holtby’s famous representation of community not simply as an affi rmation of easily achieved regional collectivity but a balancing act between confl icting gender, class and generational perspectives. In other words, it draws out the diffi cult, perhaps impossible, task faced by the interwar author in pre-senting a ‘knowable community’.

Th e present study takes these explorations of Holtby’s realism further by underlining that in order to appreciate the experimental and modern character-istics of Holtby’s realism, some consideration of her poetry, short stories, drama, satire and journalism is necessary. In this respect I build on the work of Cath-erine Clay and Chris Hopkins who have already explored the exchange between Holtby’s realism and poetry, the short story and journalism.88 Moreover, I am also mindful of the ways in which essays in Erica Brown and Mary Grover’s recent collection extend our understanding of the middlebrow beyond the real-ism/modernism dichotomy to ‘demonstrate how other aspects of form, such as illustrated texts and serial publication, are similarly devalued and complicate the notion of middlebrow as straightforwardly realist’.89 My focus lies, however, in the tension between the individual and the community and how that tension is articulated through a mixing of genres. Th e realist novel and its ability to repre-sent community can be contrasted with the solipsism of the lyric poem or that acute sense of social detachment which so oft en underpins the short story. But in Holtby’s oeuvre, we oft en fi nd similar themes, even scenes, transposed across genres. As a result, the singularity and isolation of an individual’s vision, perhaps more common to the lyric or short story, oft en functions to disrupt compla-cent assumptions of community solidarity in the novel. Th e chapters that follow focus primarily on Holtby’s novels, but do so in order to draw out precisely these moments of convergence and disruption across genre that trouble Holtby’s attempt to construct ‘knowable communities’ in the realist novel.

Plotting an Ideal CommunityJena Kennard, reading Holtby’s oeuvre in the light of feminist theories of friend-ship and object-relations maps a journey that is both spatial and psychological, starting with the rebellion against the mother’s community to reclamation of that community.90 Kennard’s reading owes much to that feminist emphasis on individual progress and autonomy, which might be partially explained by femi-nism’s ambivalence about the very concept of community. As the phrase ‘we are members one of another’ indicates, community, and certainly an ‘ideal of com-munity’, as Iris Marion Young has argued, is liable to be conceived as a repressive totality: ‘Th e ideal of community presumes subjects who are present to them-selves and presumes subjects can understand one another as they understand themselves. It thus denies the diff erence between subjects’.91 As Young explains, in

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the light of poststructuralist philosophy, any attempt to create unity will always fail because unity can only ever be predicated on establishing purity by excluding outsiders, those who are diff erent or do not conform. Any ‘ideal of community’ must repress diff erence, and as Marilyn Friedman adds, ‘Besides excluding or suppressing outsiders, the practices and traditions of numerous communities are exploitative and oppressive toward many of their own members. Th is problem is of special relevance to women’, particularly as it might enforce adherence to traditional and restrictive gender roles.92 Certainly, Holtby’s earlier novels depict community as a repressive site for her heroines where the struggle to free one-self from it is the only path towards self-realization. In the 1930s Holtby’s views on community, particularly under the shadow of European fascism, prefi gure Young’s criticism of its homogenizing pressures: as she suggests at the end of Women and a Changing Civilisation, ‘I think that the real object behind our demand is not to reduce all men and women to the same dull pattern. It is rather to release their richness of variety’.93 Th is insistence on the freedom for ‘variety’ or diff erence is an enduring feature of Holtby’s social vision, which presents in diff erent guises throughout her oeuvre.

Even in her early writing, as Chapter 1 discusses, Holtby counters representa-tions of the repressive community with a liberating alternative. Her second novel Th e Crowded Street (1924), for example, has been read as a bildungsroman that plots the heroine’s ascendance to autonomy from the restrictive social values of her marriage-obsessed, provincial community. But what is oft en overlooked is that the novel also sets up an alternative feminist community in London to which the heroine travels and which proves crucial to her development.94 Th is speaks to Marilyn Friedman’s attempts to defi ne diff erent types of community as a way of revealing the potential benefi ts of community to feminist theory and practice. According to Friedman there are two types of community: the ‘commu-nity of place’ associated with reifi ed tradition – the home and the church – and the ‘community of choice’ where a woman is able to choose the network of peo-ple amongst whom she will live and work based on friendship rather than family networks.95 Th e distinction is also spatialized so that the ‘community of place’ becomes associated with the provincial and rural as opposed to the urban and city space of the ‘community of choice’. Th ough Friedman writes in the context of Second Wave feminist collectives, this notion of moving from one kind of com-munity to a more liberating one by moving from the provincial family space to an urban site of friendship networks seems a useful way to map the narrative of Th e Crowded Street. It is also useful for describing Holtby’s migration from Yorkshire to London which generated that re-vision of her native rural community amidst post-war social and political upheaval in her fi rst novel, Anderby Wold (1923).

Holtby’s fi rst two novels each stress the importance of a ‘community of choice’ for women’s fulfi lment and interrogate the value of women’s service to

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their ‘community of place’. Local politics stands in for a potential ‘community of choice’ in Anderby Wold in which the heroine is sadly unable to participate. By contrast, Th e Crowded Street narrates the heroine’s transition to a ‘community of choice’: a feminist and socialist political organization in London. In Chapter 2 I discuss how Holtby’s third novel, Th e Land of Green Ginger, develops this need for an alternative community through which women seek self-realization. In this novel, Holtby takes the fi gure of the exile – an orphan born in South Africa but raised in Yorkshire – and plots her journey away from repressive marital life towards becoming a member of an affi liative female and transnational commu-nity – one which takes, as Edward Said observes in the context of modernist writers, ‘validated nonbiological social and cultural forms’.96

Holtby’s own experience of affi liation was evident in her personal and profes-sional life. Th ough she was never to marry or have children herself, she became the ‘Auntie’ to Brittain’s two children, and celebrated the positive role the spin-ster aunt might have in unconventional families.97 Professionally, she was a member of numerous affi liative communities ranging from Time and Tide to race equality organizations such as the League of Coloured Peoples. Holtby’s residence in London was crucial to her participation in these various forms of affi liation, which oft en underpins that representation of the city space in her works as the site of fulfi lling and unorthodox affi liative communities.

Opening up the city space as a potential site of community destabilizes assumptions about the opposition between community and modernity, and Iris Marion Young has suggested that ‘we begin from our positive experience of city life to form a vision of the good society’.98 As she points out, community has oft en been aligned with the traditional and pre-industrial because of the emphasis placed on face-to-face contact as the more authentic social interaction. By con-trast, the urban and the city have been cast as sites of detachment and alienation where such meaningful social contact is disrupted by bureaucracy and capitalism. Yet city life, Young argues, might in fact become the unoppressive antithesis to the totalizing tendencies of community, since it allows diff erences of sexuality, race, and culture to exist side by side, and its anonymity off ers freedom to those such as independent women, lesbians and gay men who might otherwise be excluded. Th e very word, ‘community’ becomes problematic in Young’s analysis, but she concludes that whatever label we adopt, we need to foster a vision of ‘social rela-tions that embody openness to unassimilated otherness.’99

Th ere is something of this ‘openness to unassimilated otherness’ at work in Holtby’s fourth novel, Poor Caroline, which I explore in Chapter 3. Here, the focus is a fi ctional affi liative community, the ‘Christian Cinema Company’: a group of would-be cinema reformers which include a set of social misfi ts and travellers – a spinster, a Jewish businessman, a Scottish inventor, a South African orphan and two nomadic socialites. With Poor Caroline the emphasis is less on

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fulfi lment through this affi liative community than on problematizing its ideals, or to put this in Said’s words, ‘to show how affi liation sometimes reproduces fi liation’ in ways which recreate oppressive power structures.100 It is in this way that Holtby evidences a self-refl exive tendency to critically analyse reformers’ motives and conduct within their chosen communities. Also, and perhaps more importantly, at stake here is a radical revision of community located within the national body that brings together colonials, self-exiles and immigrants at the metropolitan centre. Th e ‘Christian Cinema Company’ can therefore also be read as what Homi K. Bhabha terms an ‘[a]ffi liative solidarity … a temporality of social construction and contradiction that is iterative and interstitial’.101 Or in other words, it represents a minority collective which occupies a gap within dominant culture, which by its very presence represents a challenge to that dom-inant culture. In this case, the Christian Cinema Company declares its purpose is to sanitize and purify British cinema, but its ostensible nationalist purpose is at odds with its status as a site of cultural diff erence. Particularly through its Jewish character, Poor Caroline draws attention to that diffi cult balancing act or tension in narratives of nation which look back to an imaginary, atavistic homogeneity and yet try to incorporate the shift ing alterity of the present.102

Both Th e Land of Green Ginger and Poor Caroline present a community which, as Bhabha puts it, ‘disrupts the homogeneity of the imagined community of the nation’.103 In Mandoa, Mandoa! Holtby develops this interrogation of what Benedict Anderson calls ‘imagined communities’ by juxtaposing diff erent forms of unity: nationalism and imperialism are thus countered by internationalism and cosmopolitanism. Th is is achieved through what I argue can be read as a series of transnational comparisons in Mandoa, Mandoa! between Africa and Britain which also serve to defamiliarize familiar systems of capitalism, colonialism and gender oppression by deploying a geopolitical perspective. Th is transnational and geopolitical approach to Holtby’s work is evident in other chapters, but Chapter 5 is where this is explored most extensively. I take my cue here from Susan Stan-ford Friedman who has already adopted this approach to the writings of Virginia Woolf. Despite oft en being read as a domestic writer in comparison to ex-patriot, modernist contemporaries, ‘the local is for Woolf complicit with the national and international’, Friedman observes, and ‘for Woolf […] geopolitical power rela-tions begin at home in the patriarchal structure of the family’.104 Th erefore, as Friedman points out, although Adrienne Rich criticised Woolf in the 1980s for proposing an ethnocentric global feminism when she asserted in Th ree Guineas (1938), ‘As a woman I have no country’,105 Woolf is not advocating a homog-enizing internationalism but rather ‘a transnational oppositional identity which replaces patriotism’ and provides local knowledge of gender struggles.106 Th is is also true, perhaps even more strikingly, of Holtby’s position. As discussed above, Holtby openly takes so-called ‘New Feminism’ to task for failing to appreciate that progress for women across the world is not comparable.

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Mandoa, Mandoa! presents a transnational perspective on Africa and Britain which exposes and problematizes the homogenizing pressures of both imperial-ist encroachment and internationalist reform. In so doing, the novel cautions against unquestioning membership to either nations or international bodies and urges readers to consider their place as individuals within a global commu-nity, a move which I suggest adopts a cosmopolitan stance. Jessica Berman has explored the ways in which modernist writers resist the society represented by the nation-state in favour of alternative cosmopolitan models of community. Whilst Holtby might not deploy the same level of formal experimentation to represent such alternatives, her work shares that modernist vision which Berman defi nes as ‘that dual positioning of community and cosmopolitanism’ through which ‘new realms of non-national affi liation may begin to emerge, those that resist the consolidation of force, take strength on the margins, and insist that a fl uctuating being-in-common be the source of any political being’.107

It is with this cosmopolitan perspective that I suggest readers ought to approach Holtby’s much-loved regional novel, South Riding, where the local community is placed in an international context that brings into question that ‘imagined com-munity’ of the nation. Anderson’s description is one that, as Berman notes, elides the local and the national under the label of ‘community’, when ‘nationality is not necessary to ideas of community’.108 But other critics have been keen to point out as Williams does that community is more oft en a subset within the nation, and not necessarily one that is complicit with the values of the larger society or nation state. Such insights on the disjunction between community and nation are particularly relevant to my reading of South Riding which sees Holtby’s depiction of the East-Riding community in critical dialogue both with fascist visions of the national body and conservative British policy in the 1930s. As a result, the fi nal chapter reads Holtby’s South Riding according to Bhabha’s understanding of ‘the “nation” as a narrative strategy’ to uncover the ways in which Holtby destablizes national boundaries in this novel and queries notions of Englishness.109

Th is builds on a more general argument running throughout this book which sees Holtby’s social vision as one disrupting that ‘consolidated vision’ which Edward Said identifi es as the reaffi rming imperialist ideology of nineteenth-century realism.110 Whilst Holtby’s writing might not have those formal features which Said identifi es as Modernism’s ironic response to a crumbling empire, her work nevertheless undermines that ‘unanimity of view’ which had previously con-fi rmed European superiority.111 Each chapter that follows draws attention to how Holtby dismantles this ‘unanimity of view’ in order to recreate and represent her own sense of unity. In her fi rst two novels, Holtby looks back both nostalgically and critically to the community of origin from the vantage point of the ‘com-munity of choice’, whilst Th e Land of Green Ginger generates what she calls the ‘two-dimensional eff ect’: a juxtaposition of British and African localities which refuses to represent empire as a ballast for precarious postwar notions of nation-

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hood.112 Th is is a technique later developed into a political critique of economic and cultural imperialism in Mandoa, Mandoa! in order to fl ag up questions of global interdependence and transnational complicity. And South Riding marks the return home, summed up in the gaze cast over the East Riding landscape by the spinster schoolmistress, a London professional who has travelled to South Africa and who stands in for the author’s re-vision of her birthplace.

What is striking about these various modes of seeing is that they originate from the position of the traveller: the author herself who has travelled away from her native community in Yorkshire and from her professional friendship network in London, and then the various characters who are also travellers to Africa or from other parts of the empire. In paying attention to the ways in which Holtby’s writing navigates diff erent spaces and presents a sense of place, I have I mind the work of Jennifer Poulos Nesbitt, who maps how interwar female novelists such as Holtby ‘reshaped and reworked literary conventions of place to unseat conventional notions of masculinity and femininity’.113 A particular focus for my study is how Holtby signals the observer’s position in relation to society as they travel into diff erent spaces. Th is oft en functions to undermine assump-tions of cultural superiority and the appropriating, masculine imperialist gaze of what Mary Louise Pratt terms ‘the-monarch-of-all-I-survey scene’.114 Th erefore in place of a ‘consolidated vision’, I suggest here that Holtby presents a mode of seeing which, following Stoneman’s analysis of South Riding, is closer to Donna Haraway’s reassessment of objectivity. Evaluating Haraway’s rehabilitation of seeing and vision for feminist discourse, Rosi Braidotti notes that Haraway’s suggestion that ‘we learn to see in compound, multiple ways, in “partial perspec-tives”’ advances a mode of enquiry and understanding that is ‘like the eye of a traveling lens’, conscious of its situated, limited and shift ing angle of vision.115 In this sense, Holtby’s work not only resonates with modernist contemporaries, but also subtly anticipates a postmodern feminist vision. And it is with Braidotti’s ‘travelling lens’ in mind that this book undertakes a journey through Holtby’s fi ction to explore the development of a ‘social vision’ which strove to navigate the post-war vogue for repressive unity and point the way to a ‘wiser world’ in which ‘we should fi nd a variety of personality undreamed of to-day, a social soli-darity’ and ‘a radiance of adventure’.116