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'.

Caroline's lead-part as the founding organiser of the ill-fated Christian Cinema Company is unquestioned, but her primacy among the female characters is to a degree challenged by the naturally intelligent Eleanor with her wide-eyed idealism and straightforward aspirations. Eleanor is Winifred's archetypal modern woman in the making, and as such the oracle for feminism in Poor Caroline. Eleanor is half South African to allow Winifred to recall her favourite foreign land, the only country outside Europe she visited, and a place to which she could remain closely attached because of her friendship with Jean McWilliam (of Letters To a Friend) in Pretoria. There she espoused the plight of the natives, a cause with which she became closely associated after her tour of 1926. The heroine of The Land of Green Ginger, who dreams constantly of far-off places, is also half South African. She came to England as an infant after the death of her non-Afrikaans father. Eleanor leaves South Africafollowing the same bereavement, but is an adult newcomer to England.

If Winifred's letters had been lost, or her biography not written by her closest friend, we could still glean from Eleanor a central obsession of her creator; namely, in Eleanor's words, 'this intolerable burden of immunity'. In order to overcome this inverted inferiority complex, the rich but orphaned young lady seeks out suffering and struggle, hardship and adversity: 'I have capital behind me, and education, and opportunities. All this ugliness and poverty can't really hurt me.' Winifred likewise bore the hang-ups of privilege and wealth, which her talent exacerbated. In marked contrast to Vera Brittain, she was also unscathed by the bereavements of the Great War. 'I always feel when I take my pleasures that I have snatched them in the face of fortune,' she wrote. 'But I am glad when I take them, all the same' she concluded, for she was, like Caroline, with her penchant for sweet foods, beautiful flowers and pretty clothes, no ascetic, but someone who took pleasure in rare luxuries. Winifred's nature was happy and optimistic. Believing she had no real problems, she deliberately put herself out for others in an almost self-sacrificial way to atone for being among those 'who have been gifted by fortune, we who are rich and healthy and unbound'. Overworking herself to pay back the debt she felt she owed to life, this sense of immunity was clearly cauterised by her collapse into virtually constant ill-health, which this personal complex must ironically have helped bring on.

If Eleanor voices Winifred's horror of immunity, the Anglo-Catholic curate, Roger Mortimer, represents the author's connected religious leanings. Religion, which, she once admitted, was one of the chief reasons for unhappiness in her life, was not prominent in her public utterings, but is a more obtrusive feature of her stories - Winifred had undergone a period of theological crisis, just about resolving her beliefs in an experience similar, it seems, to Roger's call to the Church one night in France. Eleanor's uncertainty about contributing to the ChristianCinema Company is also suddenly clarified as a result of listening to Roger's sermon condemning compromise. Roger's wavering between Catholicism and Protestantism, as between the demands of his vocation and the temptation of earthly love, recalls Winifred's earlier portrayal of Wyclif in The Runners, her only full-length prose work never published. Roger's dilemma also foreshadows the serious mess the endearingly sensual lay preacher, Huggins, creates for himself in South Riding. Vulnerable vicars, whether venal or virginal, thus crop up regularly in Winifred Holtby's novels.