Winifred Holtby met Vera Brittain at Somerville College. After an antagonistic beginning, the two women eventually became friends and lived together on Doughty Street (where there is now a blue plaque), just around the corner from the shop. Holtby interrupted her degree to join the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps in 1918 but resumed her studies at Oxford thereafter. Holtby was a novelist, feminist, socialist and social reformer. Her best-known novel South Riding was recently adapted by the BBC. Her 1924 novel The Crowded Street about a young woman trying to escape the limitations of provincial life is Persephone Book No. 76.