This book was conceived after reading Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth and Testament of Friendship. Winifred Holtby died very early after suffering from Bright’s Disease – renal failure – aged only 37 in 1935. Into these years, she crammed more than most people achieve in an average life. She was a kind, gentle and very generous person; she had a strong belief in equality of sex, race and status, and was a very strong feminist. She became a Director of the feminist newspaper Time and Tide. She wrote several novels, the most famous being South Riding.
During her life, she also wrote many poems but they were not published, apart from 16 in a very small book called Frozen Earth and Other Poems (1935). The Poems and Verse of Winifred Holtby captures the majority of her poetical works, which point to periods in her life, including the WAAC during 1918, (“Trains in France”); her time in South Africa in 1928 (“Hills of the Transvaal”); and the problems she had with Harry Pearson, her “boy friend that isn’t a boyfriend” (“The Dead Man,” “Epilogue to Romance,” “The Robber” and “The Grudging Ghost”).
The span of the poems range from examples of her early work (“Namely Only” and “Sad Ascension Day”), which should appeal to children and young adults; to “The Debt,” which describes Winifred’s feeling of the debt she thought she owed to life, which gives the reader an idea of the caring person that she was; through to one poignant poem which she wrote towards the end of her life, “The Valley of Shadows,” which is a poem of love and thankfulness and shows the debt she considered she owed to her close friend Vera Britttain.
