Testament of Friendship

WINIFRED HOLTBY was a gifted and gracious woman. She combined a passion for social justice and a genius for friendship with a capacity to write lively and versatile journalism, and sensitive and intelligent novels. Vera Brittain suggests that her life was a perpetual conflict between her social conscience and her creative urges, and that she reluctantly sacrificed art to altruism; but the quotations from Winifred Holtby’s letters reveal a harmonious personality, rich in many-sided human, public, and artistic interests, entirely without egotism or self-dramatization. The note of frustration never sounds in anything she herself wrote. ‘I have had a lovely life,’ she said, when she was told that she was doomed to an early death. This is a sincere if somewhat over-adjectived book, but, as its title indicates, it is less a biography of Winifred Holtby than a memorial to her friend’s love.