Mandoa, Mandoa! [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Winifred Holtby began writing Mandoa, Mandoa! towards the end of 1931 during the aftermath of the October General Election. It was a time of national disillusionment; a succession of economic disasters and rising unemployment had forced the collapse of the Labour Government, and its replacement by a National Government at the October election marked the beginning of an era of hopelessness when the Depression seemed to settle inexorably on the country, and when timidity and expediency were to dominate the political scene. And for those who listened, "the angry noise of history" could already be heard in ominous unrest and aggression abroad. The end of 1931 also saw the onset of Winifred Holtby's serious and ultimately fatal illness, kidney failure. Its symptoms must have seemed an internalisation of the disintegration around her. In one of the poems in her sequence, "For the Ghost of Elinor Wylie", she described what it was like to have abnormally high blood pressure: in the abysmal hour, When angry pulses leap, And black blood lashes its frustrated power Against tall cliffs of sleep The fear, the pain, were mine. Mandoa, Mandoa! is perhaps a surprising response to these events and circumstances but in the light of what is known of Winifred's personality, not uncharacteristic. She worked on the novel in the loneliness of a rented cottage at Monks Risborough, near Oxford, where she had been sent to rest, and it was written, Vera Brittain tells us, "mostly in bed when her body was tormented by pain and her mind had to struggle, often after wakeful nights, against impairment by heavy drugs". But there is no doubt that at this time, and in varying degrees throughout her life, writing was an escape from unhappiness, from the ultimate distress of knowing that she who was still