Writing from Grahamstown, South Africa in 1926, Holtby sketched out to Brittain ideas for a new novel to be called ‘Hungarian Rhapsody’:

Although the completed novel would synthesize these myriad elements of Holtby's travel experience, its eventual title was to be The Land of Green Ginger, ‘after that lovely street in Hull’. The change of title served to root the narrative focus in Yorkshire with a distant eye on enchanting, exotic places. Thought to perhaps derive from the influence of Dutch immigrants to Hull in the seventeenth century, the streetname itself bears this duality of the domestic and foreign. Whether or not Holtby knew this, her heroine's wonder and fascination with the street's uncommon name seems to impart some of the author's own: ‘The Land of Green Ginger, dark, narrow, mysterious road to Heaven, to Fairy Land, to anywhere, anywhere, even to South Africa which was the goal of all men's longing, the place where Father lived in a rondavel, the place …’. As Joanna's admiring description suggests, in Holtby's novel, ‘The Land of Green Ginger’ becomes a site of fantasy and escape into distant, make-believe worlds.