The Crowded Street
1924
The Crowded Street opens on a moment many will recognize: an eleven-year-old girl at a party, heart pounding, palms sweating, desperate to disappear into the wallpaper. Muriel Hammond is shy, awkward, and convinced the world has noticed every stumble. When she's caught sneaking sweets, the small humiliation threatens to shadow everything that follows. But this is no mere childhood memoir. Winifred Holtby traces Muriel's journey from that painful evening into young womanhood in the fictional Yorkshire town of Marshington, where every door seems to lead back to the same cramped parlor of expectation. Her mother is socially ambitious, perpetually calculating how appearances might be managed. Muriel watches other young women drift away to lives of work and possibility while she waits, as she puts it, 'to see what they will do', while men do as they like. The novel builds quietly toward a reckoning, not with some dramatic villain, but with the insidious smallness of a world that asks women to shrink. Holtby wrote this in 1924, yet the ache of it feels startlingly modern: the daughter who must choose between her mother's dreams and her own survival.
Editions
X-Ray
“Clever? who said that we all had to be clever? But we have to have courage. The whole position of women is what it is to-day, because so many of us have followed the line of least resistance, and have sat down placidly in a little provincial town, waiting to get married. No wonder that the men have thought that this is all that we are good for.””
— Winifred Holtby
“...You can't wriggle out of responsibility by a metaphor. Your life is your own, Muriel, nobody can take it from you. You may choose to look after your mother; you may choose to pursue a so-called career, or you may choose to marry. You may choose right and you may choose wrong. But the thing that matters is to take your life into you own hands and live it, accepting responsibility for failure or success. The really fatal thing is to let other people make your choices for you, and then to blame them if your schemes should fail and they despise you for the failure.””
— Winifred Holtby
“Ah, surely the short story should end with tragedy, for only sorrow swoops upon you with a sudden blow. But happiness is built up from long years of small delightful things. You can't put them into a short story.””
— Winifred Holtby
Link to this book
Add a free, dofollow link to Lex on your blog, forum, syllabus, or reading list.
<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/the-crowded-street-3a0841d8-10b8-486c-8509-4f3188d3b7e4"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/the-crowded-street-3a0841d8-10b8-486c-8509-4f3188d3b7e4)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/the-crowded-street-3a0841d8-10b8-486c-8509-4f3188d3b7e4][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/the-crowded-street-3a0841d8-10b8-486c-8509-4f3188d3b7e4Cite this book
Reading this edition for a paper or guide? Copy a citation.
Holtby, Winifred. The Crowded Street. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-crowded-street-3a0841d8-10b8-486c-8509-4f3188d3b7e4.Holtby, W. (1924). The Crowded Street. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-crowded-street-3a0841d8-10b8-486c-8509-4f3188d3b7e4Holtby, Winifred. The Crowded Street. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-crowded-street-3a0841d8-10b8-486c-8509-4f3188d3b7e4.
