Those days are gone in which romantic novels had heroines called Muriel. Even on first publication 84 years ago, The Crowded Street was not a conventional romantic novel nor Muriel Hammond a conventional heroine — but the former embraces elements of romance, the latter aspects of heroism. The subversion of our expectations of heroism and romance provides the dynamic of Winifred Holtby’s second novel, originally published in 1924.
The Crowded Street is a family saga, comedy of manners and roman à clef. It tells the story of Muriel Hammond, from schoolgirl to maturity. The Hammonds inhabit the determinedly genteel Yorkshire village of Marshington, its confines narrow, its mindset small. Muriel leaves school to embark on Marshington life armed only with a determination ‘so much to be good’ and a naive certainty that excitement beckons. Her disillusionment is slow but inexorable. Marshington values a single quality in women: marriageability. It is a quality Muriel lacks.
Written when Winifred Holtby was 26, The Crowded Street is strongly autobiographical. Holtby shared Muriel’s apparent unmarriageability. Yet Holtby, unlike Muriel, was able to forge strong emotional bonds, notably with Vera Brittain, whose Testament of Friendship celebrates the two women’s intense and creative relationship.
Compared with Winifred herself, Muriel is a cipher, passive and fearful to the point of self-annihilation, one ‘whose eager clutching hands let slip prizes’. Schooled in the conventions of novels of this sort, the reader follows Muriel’s fictional journey with a light heart — certain that, despite Muriel’s best efforts, glittering prizes will ultimately be hers. The reader is mistaken — or at least surprised.
Holtby’s resolution resists the easy fairytale of ‘happy ever after’, offering up instead an outcome nearer to the author’s own experience. In doing so, it strikes a pose characteristic of interwar feminism.
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