In 1915 a piece by the sixteen year-old Winifred Holtby about an attack on Scarborough by two German warships appeared in the local paper, but her first publication was in 1911, a book of poems commercially printed as a surprise from her mother Alice. Alice Holtby was the East Riding’s first female alderman, and her encouragement of her daughter’s independence and education was probably the reason Winifred did not see the need for feminism until she left home.

Interrupting her degree in Modern History at Oxford to volunteer as a nurse, Winifred served in London and France as a member of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corp. After the War she finishing Oxford she moved back to London with Vera Brittain. Their relationship, chronicled in Vera’s Testament of Friendship, was one of the iconic friendships of the women’s movement. Vera's first two novels were ignored, Winifred had more success with Anderby Wold, The Crowded Streetand The Land of Green Ginger.

Winifred wrote as a journalist for more than twenty newspapers and magazines, including The Yorkshire Post, the Manchester Guardian, the feminist journal, Time and Tide, and a regular weekly article for the trade union magazine, The Schoolmistress. She also produced a critical study of Virginia Woolf and a volume of short stories, Truth is Not Sober.

A pacifist, she lectured extensively for the League of Nations Union, attending the League’s assemblies as a writer and speaker every year from 1923 to 1930. A critic of the class system, inherited privileges and sex inequality, she was active in the Independent Labour Party and the Six Point Group. In 1929 Holtby published A New Voter's Guide to Party Programmes, directed at women shortly after they first got the vote in the UK.

She travelled throughout Europe in the post-war period, In 1926 Winifred accepted an invitation to tour South Africa establishing a branch of the League of Nations Union in Ladysmith, helping set up a black transport workers' union in Johannesburg and studying the effects of discrimination. She campaigned against racial discrimination and raised money for education, grants and sponsorships until the end of her life. Her observations of racism found their way into the novel Mandoa, Mandoa!

Although living in London and Winifred’s whole life was bound up with the "curves of the hills, the outline of the wolds" – as with Storm Jameson her family ties to the life and landscape of the region had a powerfully ambivalent effect on her life and writing. The region formed her strength of personality, her drive, its landscape cradles the characters in her novels of strong women, social crusaders, but she also felt she had to escape the region to thrive.

Winifred spent her life failing to resolve whether she was a "reformer sort of person or a writer sort of person" and, according to Vera Brittain, lived in "the permanent clash between her desire to help the inhabitants of the real world, and her longing to escape to the society of an imaginary one." The clash probably contributed to her early death in 1935, just before the publication of her great book South Riding, again with strong central women characters, again people tied to landscape, a fantastic study of northern civic principle.

"I have been an institution, not a person - never alone except in bed - writing usually in a room full of people so I can be on the spot if needed."