The Crowded Street

The Crowded Street / Winifred Holtby
London: Virago, 1981, c1924.
288 p.

I have a large collection of Viragos picked up over the years. This one was a more recent find, and I decided to read it recently when I was going through my bookshelves during lockdown. It's quite an interesting story, if perhaps a bit slow paced. 

Muriel Hammond lives in Marshington, in Yorkshire, and her family is a middle class one -- after her schooling she's expected to stay home and do as her mother wants, until she gets married, of course. Muriel, however, doesn't seem to be a hot commodity on the marriage market, and year after year she makes the rounds with her mother, feeling more dull, bored and stultified. One of her lively neighbours returns home from her city life with a fiance in tow -- he isn't handsome or rich, but he's a good and intelligent person, one who sparks Muriel's awareness that you can find another person who is both interesting and interested in you.

But her routine life is broken up by the arrival of WWI. This changes a lot, though not quite as much as you'd think in this little country town. Muriel, however, makes a big leap and goes to London to be a roommate to her old friend, who is active in political activism. She feels a breath of freedom and the expansion of her mind as it starts working again.

A thread that runs through the novel right from the early pages when Muriel is a shy 11 year old at a local children's party is the presence of Godfrey Neale, the son of the local landowners. He appears and reappears, falling in love with one of Muriel's schoolmates who comes down to stay, joining up during the war, and then reappearing at the door of her flat in London not knowing she's now living there. He is the biggest matrimonial prize of Marshington and is still single, not having decided on who might be good enough for him and his property. Seeing Muriel's new independence, he becomes interested in her -- but is it too late, now that Muriel has a sense of a life outside conventional Marshington? 

The moments of Muriel's life are small and quiet, almost non-existent from the outside. But Muriel's experience of them, her inner life, are much stronger. Seeing her evolve from her learned helplessness into a real person, but not until she's into her 30s, is fascinating and feels very authentic. There are very emotionally dramatic moments -- the war, her sister's ill-advised marriage (that chapter feels like Emily Bronte sat down to contribute a scene) -- and Muriel's view of it all shaping the story. 

I really liked this one. I was drawn in by the deliberateness of Muriel's life, and by the structure, which jumps from year to year, leaving great gaps in which it's apparent nothing has changed at all meanwhile. It is a thoughtful look at self-determination, choice, and the role of women in this Edwardian and then interwar England. And the ending was a satisfying one, always appreciated.