Author Description

"In the collection at Chetham's Library, Manchester, is an illustrated novel, published in 1877. Titled The Story of a Honeymoon, the novel was written and illustrated by Charles H. Ross and Ambrose Clarke... Ambrose Clarke never existed... The artist drawing as this fictional man was a woman, Marie Duval. She was an actress and cartoonist known for her reckless comedic drawing style. As one of only a handful of women cartoonists in a male publishing environment, her work was habitually disguised, emasculated, overwritten and stolen. After her death, her male collaborators took the opportunity to erase her from history. They almost succeeded. In 2017, Simon Grennan identified Duval's work in The Story of a Honeymoon for the first time. Grennan has been instrumental in bringing Duval's work back to public view... In Drawing in Drag by Marie Duval Grennan focuses on the manners and habits of twenty-first century mass leisure culture, plus its roots in the great cities of the nineteenth century. He adopts the pseudonym Marie Duval, producing drawings in drag, as a woman."--Publisher's notes.