Poor Caroline

WINIFRED HOLTBY

(1898-1935) was born in Rudston, Yorkshire. In the First World
War she was a member of the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps,
and then went to Somerville College, Oxford where she met
Vera Brittain. After graduating, these two friends shared a flat in
London where both embarked upon their respective literary
careers. Winifred Holtby was a prolific journalist, writing for the
Manchester Guardian,
the
J^'ews Chronicle
and
Time and Tide
of
which she became a director in 1926. She also travelled all over Europe as a lecturer for the League of Nations Union.

Her first novel,
Anderby Wold,
was published in 1923, followed,
in 1924, by
The Crowded Street.
She wrote five other novels:
The
Land of Green Ginger
(1927),
Poor Caroline
(1931),
Mandoa, Mandoa!
(1933)
and South Riding
(1936), published posthumously after her
tragic death from kidney disease at the age of thirty-seven. She
was awarded the James Tail Black prize for this, her most famous
novel.

She also published two volumes of short stories,
Truth is Not
Sober
(1934) and
Pavements at Anderby
(1937); a satirical work,
The
Astonishing Island
(1933); two volumes of poetry;
My Garden
(1911) and
The Frozen Earth
(1935); a critical work,
Virginia Woolf
(1932); a study of the position of women,
Women and a Changing
Civilisation
(1934), and numerous essays.

Winifred Holtby's remarkable and courageous life is movingly
recorded in Vera Brittain's biography,
Testament of Friendship,
published by Virago.

WINIFRED HOLTBY

POOR CAROLINE

With a New Introduction by
GEORGE DAVIDSON

PENGUIN BOOKS —VIRAGO PRESS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Viking Penguin Inc., 40 West 23rd Street,

New York, New York 10010, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Limited, 2801 John Street,

Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 1B4

Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

Auckland 10, New Zealand

Eirst published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Limited 1931
First published in the United States of America by

Robert M. McBride & Co. 1931
This edition first published in Great Britain by
Virago Press Ltd. 1985 Published in Penguin Books 1986

Copyright Robert M. McBride & Co., 1931

Introduction copyright
©
George Davidson, 1985

All rights reserved

Printed in the Linked States of America by

R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia

Set in Baskerville

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the con
dition that it shall not, bv way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired
out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any
form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and with
out a similar condition including this condition being imposed on

In Piam Memoriam
M.C.H.

Author's Note

So far as my knowledge extends, there has never been a
Christian Cinema Company formed for the Purification of
the British Film, there has never been an Anglo-American
School of Scenario Writing, nor a Metropolitan and Provin
cial Correspondence College for the teaching of Journalism.
But my ignorance is wide. These institutions may have an
existence outside my own imagination. If so, I beg to inform
their promoters and organizers that I forgive them their
plagiarism in advance, and wish them the success that they
deserve.

Winifred Holtby.

Contents

OPENING CHORUS

I BASIL REGINALD ANTHONY ST. DENIS

II JOSEPH ISENBAUM

III
ELEANOR DE LA ROUX

IV
HUGH ANGUS MACAFEE
V ROGER AINTREE MORTIMER

VI CLIFTON RODERICK JOHNSON

VH CAROLINE AUDREY DENTON-SMYTH

FINAL CHORUS

Introduction

Poor Caroline
was hailed as 'easily the wittiest novel of the season'
upon its appearance in 1931. This represented a watershed in
Winifred Holtby's career as a novelist, since her previous three
novels had more or less dissatisfied her, and been commercially unsuccessful. At the time of writing her fourth novel she was
well-known as a radical campaigner and journalist. But it was
with
Poor Caroline
that her fortunes as a novelist changed: it was
favourably reviewed and sold well. Sadly, this was also the year
which saw the onset of the kidney failure that was to drastically
reduce her wide-ranging literary and polemical output.

Although
Poor Caroline
was received as a tragi-comedy, its overall tone is consciously comic. Despite a strong love element
and gradual pathos, the author's perception is satirical, in the
same mould she was to use in her next novel,
Mandoa, Mandoa!
One contemporary criticism of
Poor Caroline
as suffering 'from
excess of cleverness' reinforces the impression of Winifred's
increased self-assurance. 'All the characters are drawn in a few
strokes with a deft touch', approved one reviewer. The author
was praised for appearing 'intelligent, unsentimental yet
benign', particularly in respect of the eponymous heroine,
Caroline Denton-Smyth. This old maid, with her vision of
perfect movies, is the improbable thread holding together her
society for the moral purification of British cinema, the
'Christian Cinema Company'. Winifred had tried to elevate
from literary obscurity another traditionally unpersonable,
depressing subject, the home-ridden young anti-heroine of
The
Crowded Street.
As
The Yorkshire Post
critic, Alice Herbert,
observed of Caroline: 'Altogether, she has pulled the comic
spinster out of her rut, which fiction has made wearisome ...

Miss Holtby's gift lies partly in taking a type that many novelists accept as ready-made, and in showing its enormously varied and
complicated humanity.'

What immediately distinguishes
Poor Caroline
from Winifred
Holtby's 'Yorkshire' novels is its setting in London. In so far as all
the other novels are designated by location - albeit meta
phorically in two instances, the very title announces a different
flavour to
Poor Caroline.
Otherwise only in
Mandoa, Mandoa.',
Winifred's exotic treatment of colonialism in Africa, is the main action centred elsewhere than in the rural East Riding she knew and loved, or the small-town north of England she despised and avoided. With the exception, therefore, of the 'Opening Chorus'
(a sharp stab at the complacent, provincial middle class) and two
scenes, including the balancing 'Final Chorus', in Monte Carlo
(where Winifred holidayed during the writing of the novel and
was fascinated by the loose-living gossipy circles of artists), the
events
of Poor Caroline
take
place in London in the twenties. The
metropolis excited Winifred right from the initial prospect of coming down from Oxford in 1921. But although she spent the greatest and most active part of her working life in the city, her
only other sizeable fictional use of London is Book One of
Mandoa, Mandoa!
This apparent
imbalance in favour of her
childhood home is accounted for by Winifred's idyllic upbringing
under a
remarkable mother. The author is pinpointing a home
truth in the passage describing Caroline's reflections on her own life: 'It was strange, but that child's life at Denton now seemed
more vivid to her than all her subsequent adventures.'

Winifred's years in London were spent at a scarcely credible
pace of production. She lectured on Pacifism and campaigned
for Feminism, revelling in the atmosphere like Eleanor De La
Roux, for whom 'London hummed with the activities of
propaganda and reform'. Although she was generally engaged
upon the writing of her next novel or short story, her lifestyle was,
as we know from Vera Brittain's biography of her flatmate in
Testament of Friendship,
rarely tranquil enough to allow sustained
periods of creativity. For instance, she sat on numerous
committees, believing avidly in decision-making and progress by
means of discussion and debate. Hence the detail and insight, in
this work and in
South Riding,
with which she evokes such formal
meetings. She also saw the dramatic potential of such gatherings
as choice battle-grounds for the antagonistic interaction of characters.

Poor Caroline
originated in a family connection. Mary Home
was an aunt of one of Winifred's early governesses, who, like so
many hangers-on to the Holtby family, drew on the patient favours and hospitality of Winifred or her mother. Caroline is evidently directly based upon this Mary Home, since Vera
Brittain describes how the idea for the novel came to a regretful
Winifred after the death of this tiresome, yet likeable, old eccentric, who must have impinged upon Winifred's acute
conscience. Hence the dedication 'In piam memoriam M.C.H.',
and the fact that one reviewer unwittingly complimented Miss
Holtby upon her 'ability to create characters who are so real one
suspects her of knowing them'.