Bryan and Mary Talbot on Lo! An Amazon!

Today we at SelfMadeHero are proud to say that Lo! An Amazon! The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Mary Wollstonecraft is out now in the UK! This is another landmark collaboration from the award-winning duo Bryan and Mary M. Talbot, putting to page the life of the eponymous author and foundational feminist philosopher.

On their remarkable new title, the Talbots had this to say...

Multiple award-winning artist Bryan Talbothas been working in comics for over forty years. He’s produced underground, fantasy and superhero stories such as Batman and Sandman, and graphic novels including The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, The Tale of One Bad Rat, Alice in Sunderland, the Grandville series, as well as illustrating the books written by his wife, Mary M. Talbot.

Bryan and Mary are both founding patrons of The Lakes International Comic Art Festival. Bryan was awarded a Doctorate in Arts and another in Letters and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Mary M. Talbot is an academic turned graphic novelist. Her first graphic novel, Dotter of her Father’s Eyes (with Bryan Talbot), won the 2012 Costa Biography Award. Her other graphic novels include Sally Heathcote, Suffragette (2014, with Kate Charlesworth and Bryan Talbot), The Red Virgin (2016, with Bryan Talbot), and Rain (2019, with Bryan Talbot). Her most recent academic book is Language and Gender (3rd ed, 2019). She was Visiting Professor of Graphic Narrative at Lancaster University until 2024. Her previous graphic novel with Bryan Talbot, published by SelfMadeHero, was Armed with Madness: The Surreal Leonora Carrington (2023).

SelfMadeHero: To start at the beginning, how did the idea of a graphic biography of Mary Wollstonecraft come to be?

Bryan Talbot: It was Mary's idea.

SMH: Readers might recall your 2014 title Sally Heathcote: Suffragette, made in collaboration with Kate Charlesworth. Did that graphic novel help lead you to this one?

Mary Talbot: It was about continuing my interest in the history of feminism, in gender issues more generally, so, in that sense, the suffragette book led to this one. With both, I was driven by a search for a substantial subject worthy of years of scrutiny. Mary Wollstonecraft as a biographical subject, though, I wouldn’t have taken on without full access to university library resources. For 3 years, I had the honour of being Visiting Professor of Graphic Narrative at Lancaster University, having been invited by the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing.

SMH: Tragically and famously, Mary Wollstonecraft died at only 38 years old, but not before meeting innumerate other notable thinkers and earning herself scores of accomplishments. How did you go about adapting and condensing such a storied life?

Bryan: Mary did it!

Mary: Scripting a graphic biography involves an enormous amount of selection and condensation. I always put together a detailed timeline of events first – the basic raw material – then gradually select from it to construct a narrative. With the Leonora Carrington biography, I eventually decided to focus on her early years, with her departure to a new life in Mexico as the main finishing point. She lived to the grand old age of 94 – I couldn’t possibly cram it all in! I didn’t have to do that with Mary Wollstonecraft, but she certainly packed a lot into her 38 years.

SMH: Your last book published by SelfMadeHero was Armed with Madness, a graphic biography of the renowned surrealist Leonora Carrington. Do you see any likenesses between Carrington and Wollstonecraft’s experiences as female members of broadly male-dominated movements?

Mary: I don’t get the impression that Wollstonecraft was marginalized, as a woman, in the circles of radicals and revolutionary sympathisers she mixed with. She certainly wasn’t cast in the role of artist’s muse, as Carrington was. In society more broadly, yes of course, they had patriarchy to contend with. They were both struggling to live their lives the way they’d chosen.

SMH: Including the award-winning Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, which partially focused on Lucia Joyce, you have now collaborated on multiple period pieces concerning historically notable women who experienced mental ill health. Why is this such a potent throughline in your collective work?

Mary: 3 of the 6 books we’ve collaborated on have protagonists with mental health issues, yes. In Dotter, Lucia Joyce’s life served as a complement/counterpoint to mine; we were both daughters with a James Joyce connection. In Armed with Madness, Carrington had a severe mental crisis in the turmoil of WW2. Both were rebel daughters whose families used their illness as pretext for locking them up. Wollstonecraft’s ‘melancholia’ was perhaps rather different, but all three women were engaging in mighty struggles for self-determination.

SMH: What did Lo! An Amazon! demand of you both compared to any of your previous collaborations?

Bryan: For myself, a lot of visual research: architecture of the period, carriages, locations, late 18th-century clothing etc. Where possible, the locations were based on old drawings of the areas and specific buildings where the story is set. At the time, in pre-Haussmann Paris, a lot of the buildings were still medieval.

At one point we were in Le Mans, where I had an exhibition and a couple of signings, and I took the opportunity to take many photos of the medieval centre around the cathedral, a place that's frequently been used as locations for French historical movies. Visits to the Musée Carnavalet and the Musée de Montmartre were also very fruitful sources of visual reference. The Carnavalet happened to have a large exhibition centred around the role of Paris in 1789 Revolution.

We also visited places where Wollstonecraft had lodgings or visited, such as The Palace of Versailles and The Luxemburg Gardens. Painted portraits of the famous characters she knew were also useful. Visits to places like Townend in Troutbeck, a family house of the period now owned by the National Trust, were great for photographing ordinary household objects and furniture. Ditto the rebuilt harbour and 18th-century shops and The HMS Trincomalee frigate in the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Hartlepool, which are full of authentic period material. The St Pancras Old Church was another location we used for the present-day sequence, though the church was rebuilt since her time, so I used old illustrations of the building there before it for the 18th-century scenes. Of course, painted portraits of the famous characters she knew were also useful and the internet is a treasure trove of visual reference.

Mary: Portraying the historical period was an interesting challenge. We set out to do that through both image and text. I drew on the words of Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries as much as I could. We’ve visually evoked the built environment, fashions etc, but early print culture and political cartooning were also very important.

SMH: What was an aspect of Wollstonecraft’s life that you discovered or rediscovered in the process of creating this book? Did you gain any newfound perspective on the world she navigated?

Mary: I didn’t know that she was a seasoned solo traveller, or that she crossed the North Sea with an 18-month-old child and a maid! I hadn’t read a great deal of her work before, just extracts, really. I discovered her travelogue: Letters written during a Short Residence in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. I hadn’t come across it before. It’s her most accessible book for a modern reader, I think. There are some moving, lyrical passages in it, as well as beautiful descriptions of wild Scandinavian landscapes, which explain why she’s often cited as an early influence on the English Romantics.

SMH: The relevance of Lo! An Amazon! and of Mary Wollstonecraft herself are both naturally self-evident in today’s political landscape, but what do you personally hope your readers take away from this book?

Mary: I’m hoping that readers, like me, will learn to love Wollstonecraft and give her the due she deserves as one the first champions of women’s rights and education in the Western world. Also that people will enjoy the immersion in 18th-century language and print culture that we’ve tried to portray.

Thank you for reading this latest newsletter! When this hits your inbox, there will be two more Lo! An Amazon! events coming up this week in London: 

Lo! An Amazon! The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Mary Wollstonecraft is out now in the UK, and will be released in North America on November 3rd!