A review by goldfishtish
The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby

3.0

The Crowded Room is one of the most authentic portrayals I’ve read of childhood shyness and social failure. Of the shame and stifling inaction of it, and how women in particular are stymied and trapped and corralled into set paths. There were some passages that hit me very hard and made me wish I was the kind of person who copied quotes from books to reread later. But the flip side of such assiduous commitment to its theme is that at times the plot and characters are dull and dismal and overly didactic. Rarely have I both empathised so deeply with and been so frustrated (and even occasionally disgusted) by a character as I was with Muriel. Just as I was accepting that ultimately, The Crowded Room would be a dissatisfying, relentlessly slow decline, it did go somewhere, but it was hard work for a while in the middle. I think I have to let this settle for a while before I really know what I think.