Pages:
328
Original
date of publication: 1911
My
edition: 2011
Why
I decided to read:
How
I acquired my copy: Persephone subscription, June 2012
No
Surrender was published in 1911 at the height of the women’s suffrage movement
in England. The novel tells the story of to women from different walks of life:
Jenny Clegg, a former mill worker, and Mary O’Neil, an upper-class woman who
gets Jenny involved in the suffragette movement. No Surrender is a product of
Constance Maud’s involvement with the Women Writers Suffrage League, an
organization that sought to change public opinion with the use of words, and
whose members included Violet Hunt and May Sinclair.
As
a piece of social history, No Surrender is excellent in its portrayal of the
suffrage movement. But this isn’t necessarily a novel that’s just about
suffrage. It’s also about the struggle against oppressive authority and the
senseless rules that, to give an example from the novel, allow a husband to
send his children to Australia without the mother’s consent. Jenny and Mary
aren’t individual characters so much as they are representative of the larger
idea and principle, to gain suffrage not only for women but for working-class
men, too. Se we also see undercurrents of socialism. No Surrender is extremely
humorous in many places, particularly when Jenny disguises herself as a servant
in order to break up a dinner party; or when Mary demands to know why she
wasn’t arrested when she visits the prison.
This
is Persephone No. 94.
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