The Crowded Street - Softcover

Winifred Holtby

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1903155665 ISBN 13: 9781903155660

Publisher: Persephone Books Ltd, 2008

Synopsis

This is the story of Muriel Hammond, at twenty living within the suffocating confines of Edwardian middle-class society in Marshington, a Yorkshire village. A career is forbidden to her. Pretty, but not pretty enough, she fails to achieve the one thing required of her - to find a suitable husband. Then comes the First World War, a watershed which tragically revolutionises the lives of her generation. But for Muriel it offers work, friendship, freedom, and one last chance to find a special kind of happiness...

About this title

Synopsis:

The theme of "The Crowded Street" is one that is familiar from other Persephone novels: it was then assumed that young women would stay at home while looking for a husband. Muriel, who believes that 'men do as they like' whereas women 'wait to see what they will do', lives in a town in Yorkshire waiting - for what? She tries to conform to the values of her snobbish, socially ambitious mother; she tries to be 'attractive' to men; and, eventually she is rescued, by her friend Delia, a young woman who is in some ways a portrait of Vera Brittain. Throughout the description of life in small-town 'Marshington', Winifred Holtby expressed her conviction that young women should be allowed to live away from home, to work, to develop as personalities away from their families, to shake off the ties that many mothers seemed to think it was their prerogative to impose on their daughters.There are other themes, too, which make the novel fascinating: parts of it are set during the First World War (in 1918 Winifred had left Oxford to serve with the WAACs in France) and it was with first-hand knowledge of war that she spent much of her short life writing and lecturing about pacifism.

Then there are the pre-Cold Comfort Farm scenes: Muriel's sister's marries a farmer's son and lives in circumstances that would, perhaps, contribute to Stella Gibbons' satirical gaze a few years hence. Although Muriel goes away to school, most of the novel describes her life waiting for life to begin, waiting for a husband."The Crowded Street" is thus about the need to withstand the tyranny of sex success. Turn and twist how you will, it comes to that in the end. This book's conclusion is that 'the thing that matters is to take your life into your own hands and live it, accepting responsibility for failure or success. The really fatal thing to do is to let other people make your choices for you, and then to blame them if your schemes should fail and they despise you for the failure'.

About the Author:

Winifred Holtby (1898-1935), journalist, critic, feminist, pacifist and author won the James Tait Black Memorial prize with South Riding, her last novel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Persephone Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1903155665
• ISBN 13: 9781903155660
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 324