Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby (1937)

This collection of letters were written to 'Rosalind' from 'Celia'. Rosalind was Jean McWilliam and Celia, of course, Winifred Holtby. They met in a WAAC camp at Huchenneville in France toward the end of the Great War, where McWilliam was in command and Holtby her hostel-forewoman. An instant mutual respect and friendship bloomed and they became lifelong correspondents. As, after the war, McWilliam soon became a headmistress in South Africa they saw one another in the flesh very rarely. These letters expose a part of Holtby I hadn't divined in reading her first two novels - her amazonian quality and her political and philosophical savvy. But just in case that sounds rather serious it needs mentioning that the other thing they expose is her light-heartedness and wit. The sun shines and hope echoes through these missives; it's a bright book. She discusses her own novels and those of others with a self-deprecating strength of appreciation; she gives flavourful impressions of life as it was lived by her day to day; she analyses popular politics with insight; she argues lovingly and with even passion when disagreeing with McWilliam. This book also allows deep glimpses into her friendships with Vera Brittain and Stella Benson and her part in those literary times - an influence lost with her early death in 1935.

Commonplace Book

'Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection. Once characters have been born they assume a complete life about which everything exists, waiting to be recorded. The whole of art lies in the omissions.'

from a letter to 'Rosalind', October 6th 1926 in Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby

Commonplace Book

'...I really shall be disappointed if I go through life without once being properly in love. As a writer, I feel it my duty to my work - but they are all so helpless, and such children. How can one feel thrilled?'

from a letter to 'Rosalind', April 22nd 1925 in Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby

Commonplace Book

'Patriotism - love of country. How excellent an emotion - not, I think, a virtue, except in so far as any strong feeling has more strength, more virtue in it than tepidity. When we speak of it as a proper and decor[o]us sentiment towards the State, we wrong it, as a man wrongs a woman whom he loves merely because she is his wife. The love of country is a feeling for the countryside - its hills and villages and race of men. It is a thing wholly individual and un-moral, as the love for another person is individual. To confuse this love of country and race for an adulation of the State lies at the bottom of much pain and confusion - of sentimentality and positive danger, too, I think. To raise it into a civic virtue, to clothe it with pomp of armies and banners, to stain it with blood and to slay before it as before an unholy altar sacrifices of gold and of men and of men's liberty - this is not patriotism any more than the lust of a senator who lays before his mistress the spoils of a state and of his rivals in love.'

from a letter to 'Rosalind', April 10th 1925 in Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby

Commonplace Book

'But here, in this grey city, there is all the sorrow and dignity of a conquered people. Never believe any one when they tell you that it is more dignified to win than to be defeated. It isn't true. Here in the streets, lit no more brightly than London during war-time, English Tommies march up and down, looking very gay, friendly and irresponsible. Their canteens are in the best hotels, and a lovely building down by the Rhine. Outside are great notices "No Germans allowed." The money for their food is all paid from the German taxes, and the German children crowd round their bright lit windows, watching them gobble up beefsteaks. It is one of the most vulgar things that I have seen...'

from a letter to 'Rosalind', October 6th 1924 in Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby

Commonplace Book

'...I think modern art, in England anyway, has fallen under the pernicious influence of Augustus John. The Slade School calls every charming picture "pretty-pretty" and flies to the other extreme, in mistaking the grotesque for the beautiful. The poets are just as bad; for those who have energy and freshness fear to become Sunday-magazinish and write their Wheels and Rolls and other atrocities under the impression that they are out-Henleying Henley, and discovering a new pathless world of vers libre, free from the trammels of such minor accessories of poetry such as rhyme or metre or even musical language.'

from a letter to 'Rosalind', February 20, 1921 in Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby