TESTAMENT OF FRIENDSHIP: The Story of Winifred Holtby

I don't remember when a book, not recognizably top-ranking in sales possibilities, has received such immediate and unanimously enthusiastic critical acclaim. The combination of the author Testament of Youth (where many of us first encountered Winifred Holtby) and the subject of the book, author of the much admired South Riding and the too little known, Mandoa, Mandoa, gives it an excellent start. The critics are recognizing it as a memorable tribute to a fine woman and a great artist, a record of a life spent for others, while battling against a tragic love affair and a foreknowledge of imminent death. But it is also a picture of the finer side of England's intelligentsia, an answer to the scurrilous pictures of that group shown in some of the books of England's smart young moderns. Watch it -- it's destined for a permanent place in the literature of literature.