Suffering Suffragettes

No SURRENDER--Jo Van Ammers-Kuller --Button ($2.50).

"No Surrender!" is one of those slogans like "Hey Rube!" which mean little except to the initiate. "No Surrender!" means nothing particular nowadays, but not so many years ago it would have been instantly understood by any of those determined English females who shouted "Votes for Women!" in unlikely places at embarrassing moments, and continued to shout until hauled to the police station. No Surrender is the story of some of the Suffragettes' goings-on, and of the taking-off of one of their younger and prettier members.

Joyce Cornvelt, South African Dutch girl, came back to Holland when her father's death left her an orphan. But the Leyden Cornvelts did not take to her very kindly. She was glad to pay a visit to the English branch of the family. The London Cornvelts were completely Anglicized and quite prosperous; they treated her like the country cousin she was, but Joyce preferred them to the Leydeners. That was in 1908, when the question of woman's suffrage in England had already begun to burn. The Cornvelts were for it, but in a nice way; nobody had more contempt than they for the vulgar and outrageous behavior of the militant Suffragettes. Imagine their horror when they heard that Joyce had become one, and had been arrested for making an irruption into the sacred House of Commons. They tried to send her back to Leyden. She ran away. They washed their hands of her and she became more militant than ever. Four years later, helping a little band of sisters break up a Conservative meeting in an industrial town, Joyce was pursued to the roof of the auditorium, slipped, broke her neck. Six years later England granted women over 30 the right to vote and hold office; ten years after that, complete political equality.

The Author. Jo Van Ammers-Kuller, 46, called Holland's foremost novelist, likes long books with lots of relationships. To aid the unwary reader who does not realize that No Surrender is a sequel to The Rebel Generation, she has prefaced this book with a revealing but formidable genealogical table. Good and caustic when it comes to describing a family anniversary, Novelist Van Ammers-Kuller in her feminist vein gets almost committee-womanish. She started to write before she was 20, quit when she married, began again when her two boys were safe in school, her husband director of the Leyden gas works. Other translated books: Tantalus, The House of Joy, Jenny Heysten's Career.

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