At the heart of Lizzy Stewart’s graphic novel is a powerful truth: The struggle of a young woman to establish herself as an artist in times that, as Viv Albertine put it when I interviewed her about her own book, were “ungenerous” to women. This struggle is intertwined with the difficulties of women artists being able to step out of the box they’ve been put in by a more famous male artist patron.
When we first meet Alison, she’s a young wife who is isolated and bored, but not unloved. She catches the eye of a famous artist and he asks her to come back to London with him, where he will teach her.
We follow the eponymous Alison over the years and decades as she works to establish her art and her life on her own terms. We watch her strike out on her own and establish her own community of friends and artists as her work becomes stronger and more confident. And we observe the ways in which she can never quite escape her past.
Stewart makes her points with subtlety and creativity, never hammering the message home, leaving the reader to observe and make up their own minds, but it’s nonetheless powerful for this and is the kind of book that will stay with you and leave you thinking for a long time afterwards.
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