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

BookishMall.com —VIRAGO PRESS

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Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

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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 byVirago 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 condition 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 without 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 Provincial 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 metaphorically 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.