No Surrender, then, was written as a rallying cry for the women’s suffrage movement while their struggle was still very much ongoing. The sisters scored a publishing sensation in 2020, when their graphic novel adaptation of Robert Tressell’s seminal socialist novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, illustrated the thirst for this type of story.

Constance Maud’s No Surrender: A Graphic Novel by Scarlett

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.

A male advocate of the socialist cause is interested in Jenny, but she knows that their paths lie in different directions, and that her solidarity with the cause and other women may well end in her imprisonment. Much of No Surrender focusses on a cast of different social classes discussing their own viewpoints on the suffrage movement and, as with The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, that requires Scarlett Rickard to be continually inventive visually to ensure that reader interest is maintained and talking heads syndrome is never in the ascendancy.

SelfMadeHero | No Surrender

Not that men are excluded – they are often opposed to the fight but some clear sighted men are sympathetic and supportive. As with The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists the careful design considerations add to the period feel and authenticity of the book. The graphic format is the embodiment of the suffrage rally-cry of “Deeds not Words” and this book is the perfect sister-volume to their stunning adaptation of the socialist classic The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. 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. Thankfully, no efforts have been made to update the original 1911 text, which was groundbreaking in its presentation of both working women and the British and American women of status who supported them.

No Surrender, they felt, could be tweaked to bring Maud’s message to an audience 110 years after it was written.

No Surrender by Sophie Rickard published by Selfmadehero No Surrender by Sophie Rickard published by Selfmadehero

Hailed by Emily Wilding Davison as “a book which breathes the very spirit of our Women’s Movement”, the fast paced story interweaves the lives of women from all classes working together to bring about change. What makes No Surrender work is the way the relevance to our current lives shines through the story. Even those who are new to the history of the fight for the vote and equality before the law will be able to follow the story with interest. A young woman is arrested for her desperate acts, and it takes extreme events to bring about life changing decisions.

But in the end, No Surrender, in its comic book form, involves relatively little debate, or even high-minded conversation. The cruel reality that ardent working class socialists could be as against the vote for women as their pompous, privileged opposites, for example.

No Surrender (True Stories - SelfMadeHero) eBook : Rickard No Surrender (True Stories - SelfMadeHero) eBook : Rickard

What you don’t see in the graphic novel are the bits we left out – cringey dialogue, references modern readers wouldn’t understand and extraneous detail. Maud was an active suffragette, writing fiction in the same era about her authentic experience of living a marginalised life. Jenny works in the mill, partly to help support her family, in which her demanding father is never satisfied, her downtrodden mother scrapes to find enough food, and Peter, her brother is still recovering from work related illness. It feels like an addition to the tacitly accepted, everyday domestic violence all women were subjected to. Exhausted and facing an enemy who renders his abilities useless, Pietro must use every trick in his arsenal to save Wanda.

It includes one well-connected titled Lady who not only went on hunger strike in her own name but also disguised herself as a poor woman to see if she was treated in the same way. Jenny, Mary and Alice all have individual strengths and challenges, and there is something there to relate to. Along with friends from every walk of life, she brings the fight to the Prime Minister’s door – and suffers for her cause. Jenny experiences a male world that places obstacles in her way at every turn: from the managers who force back-breaking labour to hard-drinking men, Jenny can see a life of unrelenting suffering and continuous exertion laid out for her. 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.