Constance Maud’s suffragette novel No Surrender, first published in 1911, isn’t what I would call an enticing read, however authentic a record it may be of its author’s times (Maud, the daughter of a Surrey rector, joined the Women’s Freedom League in 1908, and thereafter participated enthusiastically in the same kind of peaceful civil disobedience as her characters). While it’s true that Emily Wilding Davison, the woman who would later be trampled beneath the King’s horse at Epsom, adored it, feeling that it breathed the very “spirit of our women’s movement”, most modern readers tend to find it plodding and cliched, its story never quite flaring to life.
All of which presents something of an opportunity for Scarlett and Sophie Rickard, the sisters whose last book was a graphic adaptation of Robert Tressell’s equally earnest novel of struggle and socialism, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – and boy, do they rise to it. In their hands, No Surrender is newly charming, its infelicities smoothed both by Sophie’s fleet way with speech bubbles and by Scarlett’s absolutely delightful illustrations. Every page looks splendid, whether we’re huddled in the kitchen of a tiny terrace in the fictional mill town where the story begins, or lazing in the summer sunshine on the expansive lawns of its more upper-class protagonists.
Jenny Clegg, who works long hours in a Lancashire weaving shed, can only look on as her mother’s pitiful savings are squandered by her gambler father and her sister’s children are shipped to Australia against her wishes by her violent, controlling husband. But she refuses to be entirely helpless. Things must change for women. Inspired by her aristocratic friend Mary O’Neil, she joins the struggle for the vote, a decision that will set her against the man she loves, soon to be elected a Labour MP (No Surrender stands as a reminder that many working men were just as firmly opposed to universal suffrage as those from the middle and upper classes). It will also see her spending three weeks in Holloway Prison.
The Rickards have done their research, and their narrative is full of brilliant set pieces: a demonstration in parliament that results in the removal of the grille behind which female visitors to the gallery traditionally had to sit; a dinner party at which Jenny, working undercover as a maid, ambushes the politicians who are among the hostess’s guests over their fish course; a huge and glorious march on the streets of London (for maximum impact, the latter is on pages that fold out). We also watch as O’Neil, on hunger strike in Holloway, is force fed (this is so delicately done).
A love story is indeed buried somewhere in the book’s politics. But in the end, No Surrender, in its comic book form, involves relatively little debate, or even high-minded conversation. As Emmeline Pankhurst had it: “Deeds, not words, was to be our permanent motto.” The Rickards’ suffragettes, ever stout-hearted and ingenious, are action heroines in long dresses and hobnail boots. I found them utterly irresistible, and I hope that my older nieces will feel exactly the same way when I present them with this book at Christmas time.
• No Surrender by Scarlett and Sophie Rickard is published by SelfMadeHero (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
