Constance Maud’s No Surrender — A Graphic Novel
by Scarlett and Sophie Rickard
SelfMadeHero, £18.99

IN 1911, Constance Maud, an active suffragette, wrote the groundbreaking novel No Surrender which became a rallying cry for womens’ suffrage.

The suffragette Emily Wilding Davison considered that No Surrender “breathed the very spirit of the women’s movement.”

The hero of the story is Jenny Clegg, a Lancashire mill worker who puts principles first regardless of personal cost.

Her world is dominated by men who, brutal and hard-drinking, set out to place obstacles in the way of her every move, creating a life of struggle, suffering and back-breaking labour.

From the age of 10, Jenny has worked at the textile mill. She is not alone in feeling incensed by the many injustices affecting women’s lives.

It’s shared by women from all class backgrounds. This leads to Jenny make friends with an upper-class suffragette, Mary O’Neil, and they unite in their active struggles for identical causes — civil rights, political rights and gender equality. The violence they encounter is unflinchingly described.

One hundred years later, in 2011, Constance Maud’s novel was republished.

This caught the attention of sisters Scarlett and Sophie Rickard who had already created a publishing sensation with their graphic version of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

The Rickard sisters grew up in rural Lancashire, the same county as their heroine, Jenny.

Their webpage informs us that “Sophie does the words and Scarlett draws the pictures, Scarlett has been drawing since before Sophie was born, and Sophie has been telling her what to draw since she learned to talk.” 

Whatever the pecking order may be for their creativity, the result is fiction retold in a dramatically different and thought-provoking way.

In their version of No Surrender, the Rickard sisters stick faithfully to the original text of 1911, but use brilliant illustrations, cartoon style, to convey the action as the plot unfolds.

As differing emotions are felt, the graphics change in style to correspond, embracing everything from the intimate drawing of home and work environments to the amazing pull-out panorama of a “Votes for Women” demonstration that I immediately wanted to remove from the book and fix to my living room wall.

This is history told through illustration and speech, a different way of engaging readers in a story that retains the original concepts and messages, keeps all the progressive ideas alive and reaches out to a new audience 110 years after it was written.

Many of the issues raised in No Surrender are still absolutely relevant today — reproductive rights, domestic violence, equal pay, the ethics and action of civil disobedience, gender equality. We have made strides, but the struggle continues.

If by today’s literary standards, Constance Maud’s original prose seems somewhat plodding and cliche-ridden, this graphic update of No Surrender brings the whole story back to life.

The result is stunning. So much has been written about the suffragettes. Now for something completely different.