- Born
- Died
- English writer Winifred Holtby was born in Rudston, East Riding of Yorkshire, England in 1898. She was educated at Queen Margaret's School and Somerville College in Oxford, although her education was interrupted by a year's service in the Women's Signal Unit of the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps during World War I. After graduating from Oxford in 1921 she headed to London, where she got a job at the magazine "Time and Tide", and in 1926 became the magazine's director. In addition to her writing and editing duties, she also travelled around Europe as a lecturer for the League of Nations Union.
In 1931 she began to suffer from the heart disease that would eventually cause her death, but she kept on working, both on the magazine and writing novels (she finished her novel "South Riding" only four weeks before she died). She wrote a biography of writer Virginia Woolf in 1932 and published several novels and non-fiction works before she died in London, England, in 1935. She was buried in her beloved home town of Rudston.- IMDb mini biography by: frankfob2@yahoo.com
- Holtby was educated at home by a governess and then at Queen Margaret's School in Scarborough.
- She was an English novelist and journalist, now best known for her novel South Riding, which was posthumously published in 1936.
- Although she passed the entrance exam for Somerville College, Oxford, in 1917, she chose to join the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in early 1918 but soon after she arrived in France, the First World War came to an end and she returned home. During this period, Holtby met Harry Pearson, the only man who stimulated romantic feelings in her, due primarily to his tales of the suffering soldiers endured during the war.
- In 1931 she was diagnosed as suffering from Bright's disease. Her doctor gave her only two years to live. Aware of her impending death, Holtby put all her remaining energy into what became her most important book, South Riding. Winifred Holtby died on 29 September 1935, aged 37. She never married, though Harry Pearson proposed to her on her deathbed, possibly at the instigation of Vera Brittain.
- In 1919, she returned to study at the University of Oxford where she met Vera Brittain, a fellow student and later the author of Testament of Youth, with whom she maintained a lifelong friendship.
- [on work] Without work, I'm nothing.
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