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.
