This graphic novel about Emma Goldman tells the stories of two women – anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman, one of history’s greatest orators and Dorothy Rogers, an obscure younger radical lost to history, but a key figure in Emma’s last turbulent year in Canada. Despite a shared melancholy, they fight to save a man’s life from certain death in the final poignant act of Emma’s 50 years as a revolutionary.

This true-life, epic story is interwoven in the fictional context of Helen, the writer, and Henry, the artist, as they create this graphic novel on the lives of Emma and Dorothy.

Below is an excerpt from my graphic novel about Emma Goldman.

Drawings were created using a combination of watercolour pencil, pen and acrylics.





WHO WAS EMMA GOLDMAN?

Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 – May 14, 1940) was an anarchist, feminist and revolutionary known for her political activism, writing, and speeches.

Born in Kovno in the Russian Empire (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), Goldman emigrated to the U.S. in 1885 and lived in New York City, where she met her life-long comrade Alexander Berkman. She served a year in prison for speeches she made to the unemployed in 1893.

During the early part of the 20th century she spoke to large audiences across North America. Her lectures and writings on prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality were ahead of their time. Her lectures on birth control landed her in prison. Throughout her life she faced police surveillance, physical threats, and media hysteria.

In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for their anti-draft activism. Her anarchist magazine Mother Earth was banned because of it’s anti-militarism articles.

After her release from prison, Goldman was stripped of her citizenship and deported to the Soviet Union. At first, she supported the revolution in Russia, but soon discovered it was a totalitarian state and spent the rest of her life alerting the world to this fact, much to the dismay and shunning by leftists.

After escaping Russia, she lived the life of the exile, being deported from countries across Europe. Eventually she was allowed to settle in the south of France and wrote her massive autobiography, Living My Life.

During the Spanish Civil War, she headed the English language press office of the anarchist trade union, CNT/FAI, and tirelessly raised support for the fight against fascism. In 1939, when fascism triumphed in Spain, Goldman gripped by depression over the anarchists defeat and the suicide of her friend Berkman, she moved to Canada in a final desire to save Spanish refugees. She died in Toronto, age 70.

more info, updates on progress here: https://emmagraphicnovel.wordpress.com/

Read and/or download Emma’s autobiography ‘Living my Life’ HERE