Not the marrying type
Matthew Dennison
THE CROWDED STREET by Winifred Holtby Persephone, £12, pp. 307, ISBN 9781903155660 Those days are gone in which romantic novels had heroines called Muriel. Even on first publication 84 years ago, The Crowded Street was not a conventional romantic novel nor Muriel Hammond a conventional heroine — but the former embraces elements of romance, the latter aspects of heroism. The subversion of our expectations of heroism and romance provides the dynamic of Winifred Holtby’s second novel, originally published in 1924.
The Crowded Street is a family saga, comedy of manners and roman à clef. It tells the story of Muriel Hammond, from schoolgirl to maturity. The Hammonds inhabit the determinedly genteel Yorkshire village of Marshington, its confines narrow, its mindset small. Muriel leaves school to embark on Marshington life armed only with a determination ‘so much to be good’ and a naive certainty that excitement beckons. Her disillusionment is slow but inexorable. Marshington values a single quality in women: marriageability. It is a quality Muriel lacks.
Written when Winifred Holtby was 26, The Crowded Street is strongly autobiographical. Holtby shared Muriel’s apparent unmarriageability. Yet Holtby, unlike Muriel, was able to forge strong emotional bonds, notably with Vera Brittain, whose Testament of Friendship celebrates the two women’s intense and creative relationship.
Compared with Winifred herself, Muriel is a cipher, passive and fearful to the point of self-annihilation, one ‘whose eager clutching hands let slip prizes’. Schooled in the conventions of novels of this sort, the reader follows Muriel’s fictional journey with a light heart — certain that, despite Muriel’s best efforts, glittering prizes will ultimately be hers. The reader is mistaken — or at least surprised.
Holtby’s resolution resists the easy fairytale of ‘happy ever after’, offering up instead an outcome nearer to the author’s own experience. In doing so, it strikes a pose characteristic of interwar feminism. To its first readers, among whom were those ‘surplus’ women left husbandless by the first world war, it threw a lifeline of hope. The challenge faced by such women — ill-equipped to earn their own living and defined by society exclusively in terms of their marital status — provides the key to unlock The Crowded Street. Read outside this context, it becomes vintage Bridget Jones’s Diary without the Chardonnay but with an extra stiffener of sourness.
In fact The Crowded Street contains moments of terrific comedy, like the scene in which Muriel’s sister Connie disappears at an uncontrolled gallop on the dashing hero’s chestnut mare. It is punctuated by a quietly mordant wit that ruthlessly exposes the pretensions of Marshington’s intensely snobbish provincial society: ‘Some women take to crochet as others do to cigarettes.’ Its female characters are strongly drawn, although its menfolk remain stock types. The novel is well-crafted, elegant, intelligent and persuasive. Only at the final fence does it fall.
Holtby must have been aware that the outcome she bestowed on her readers would disappoint many of them. We can rejoice in Muriel’s belated moment of selfdetermination only if we believe that she has changed enough to make her stand with conviction and certainty. And of this, this reader remains unsure. A Hollywood scriptwriter would rewrite the ending. So, too, would this reader. But then, this reader is a man.
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