Although she passed the entrance exam for Somerville College, Oxford, in 1917, she chose to join the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in early 1918 but soon after she arrived in France, the First World War came to an end and she returned home.

[2] During this period, Holtby met Harry Pearson, the only man who stimulated romantic feelings in her, due primarily to his tales of the suffering soldiers endured during the war.

[3] In 1919, she returned to study at the University of Oxford where she met Vera Brittain, a fellow student and later the author of Testament of Youth, with whom she maintained a lifelong friendship.

She was active in the Independent Labour Party and was a staunch campaigner for the unionisation of black workers in South Africa, during which she had considerable contact with Leonard Woolf.

[3] Holtby's early novels – Anderby Wold (1923), The Crowded Street (1924) (re-published by Persephone Books in 2008, having been broadcast the previous year as a ten-part BBC Radio 4 dramatisation by Diana Griffiths)[7] and The Land of Green Ginger (1927) – met with moderate success.

As well as her journalism, Holtby wrote 14 books, including six novels; two volumes of short stories; the first critical study of Virginia Woolf (1932) and Women and a changing civilization (1934), a feminist survey with opinions that are still relevant.

In Women and a changing civilisation Holtby linked the 1930s reaction against feminism to a broader "revolt against reason which has affected the intellectual life of the entire Western World".

We were about to build a brave new world upon the ruins of catastrophe ... About 1926, after the General Strike in England and its failure, after the entry of Germany into the League of Nations and the delay by the Powers in making good their promises, the slump in idealism began to set in.

Holtby noted that a former politician had explained the apathy of young women with reference to their experience of "huge impersonal events – the War, the Boom, the Slump.

'"[11] Holtby is best remembered for her novel South Riding, edited by Vera Brittain and published posthumously in March 1936, which received high praise from the critics.

"[13] In 1938, it was made into a film directed by Victor Saville;[6][8] in 1974 it was adapted by Stan Barstow for Yorkshire Television and in 2011, BBC One produced a three-part dramatisation by Andrew Davies.

On her death, Holtby left a small legacy and her own collection of books to a library in the South African township of Soweto, which was opened in December 1940.