Suzanne Lenglen was one of the world’s greatest tennis players. A revolutionary player during her career that spanned 1921 to 1927, she combined her balletic training with the more aggressive style of men’s tennis and broke conventions with her iconic style and fashion that were less about modesty and more about actually playing the game effectively, complete with her signature bandeau headwear. Known to the French press as La Divine (The Goddess), she was the first female athlete to become a global sports celebrity, and her popularity influenced Wimblendon’s shift to the larger venue that it boasts today. Touring as a professional, her chosen tour format set the stage for many men’s professional tours and led to the first major men’s professional tournament. Her celebrity was well-earned on the court, with 241 titles to her name throughout her 12-year career. For comparison, today’s reigning GOAT, Serena Williams’ more than 20-year career has earned her just over 100 singles and doubles titles.
Yet few people know Lenglen’s name… “Like a lot of tennis fans, I only knew about Suzanne Lenglen because there’s a court named after her at the French Open,” explains award-winning writer and illustrator Tom Humberstone, whose upcoming graphic novel, Suzanne: The Jazz Age Goddess of Tennis, will change that.
One of the greatest tennis players the world has ever seen was a woman few even remember. A championship player by the age of fifteen in a Europe overshadowed by impending war, Suzanne Lenglen broke records for ticket sales and match-winning streaks, scandalised and entranced the public with her playing outfits, and became a pioneer, making friends and enemies throughout restrictive tennis society in the trailblazing jazz age.
With stunning art and an astute eye, and featuring a foreword by founding co-secretary of the Women’s Tennis Association and International Tennis Hall of Fame member Françoise Dürr, Suzanne explores how a figure both enormously influential and too-often overlooked battled her father’s ambition, bias in sporting journalism, and her own divisive personality, to forge a new path — and to change sport forever.
Humberstone has always had an interest in tennis, growing up watching Wimbledon with his mother. “Around 2015, after a variety of bad news — both politically and personally — following the sport started to feel like an act of self-care and it became a bigger part of my life. I think the idea of sport being a therapeutic distraction or a way for people to navigate difficult times is something that became a big part of why I wanted to make this book.” Two years later he picked up Love Game: A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon by Elizabeth Wilson, which sent him down a rabbit hole to learn more about Lenglen. “I thought it was depressing that this player, who was so influential and enjoyed so much success, was largely forgotten and barely written about. I think that’s an inevitable part of a player’s sporting afterlife. There’s a fickleness to sporting fame. That was a theme I became obsessed with and that found its way into every page of the book. When I realised there was a specific version of Lenglen’s story I was interested in reading — that didn’t exist — I started down the road of writing Suzanne.”
“Nothing about her style of play or her personality was dry,” says Humberstone about why he felt that a graphic novel best represented this vibrant figure. “It was important to me that Suzanne’s story wasn’t relayed in the dry prose of a tennis textbook or in stuttering archival footage. I wanted to create a comic that captured the vibrancy of the sport, her style, and the time she lived in.”
“It wasn’t just Suzanne’s incredible life that interested me,” says Humberstone, “it was the context. Her career in tennis almost perfectly mirrors the rise and decline of the Roaring Twenties. The 1920s also happened to be an era when the concept of celebrities and, more specifically, sporting celebrities became a global phenomenon. It was a time of great indulgence (for those that could afford it) that came after a traumatic war In Europe and a global pandemic. Suzanne’s popularity wasn’t in a vacuum. She was the perfect sports star for the socio-political moment. That was fascinating to me.”
For women, the game of tennis has come with all the sexism expected. Only this year, Wimbledon has finally ditched its tradition of announcing women by their marital status and marking their achievements by their husbands’ names. A long-overdue change, but the organization still has far to go, as does tennis itself. “It wasn’t until 2007, after the incredible work of Venus Williams, that women were paid equal prize money to the men,” notes Humberstone. “Wimbledon was the last of the four Grand Slam tournaments to make this change.” Born in Paris in 1899, Lenglen would be glad to see these changes taking place, but, Humberstone feels that she would be “sad and embarrassed for the sport that these changes didn’t happen until the 21st Century. I’m not sure she would be surprised though, given her own experiences with tennis institutions.”
This book is as much about the roaring ’20s, the war, and how these events affected Lenglen’s life and tennis career, but Humberstone was adamant that she remain the center of her own story, with every chapter titled after a nickname given to her. “I wanted this book to be about the human being, not the icon or historical figure. Without wanting to spoil it for readers, her arc throughout the book hopefully reflects this.”
Humberstone also wanted this graphic novel to be a love letter to the sport itself — if not the establishments that run it, he adds. “There’s an aesthetic beauty inherent to the sport that I genuinely think most comic readers would appreciate. A lot of contemporary pundits of the sport will tell you the closest comparison to tennis is boxing, but I disagree. It’s ballet. Sports comics are so rare. I suppose because comics were/are considered a nerdy pursuit and sports aren’t. But to me, following sports is just being a more socially acceptable form of nerd. I hope this comic also highlights the incredible narratives and storylines that you can find in sports.”
Accompanying the book is a Spotify playlist curated by Humberstone to listen to during his writing and researching:
“It was largely instrumental music that either evoked a tone/emotion for particular scenes or music from the era to set the atmosphere while I wrote. I found I was listening to a lot of Max Richter during this time — in particular, his score for the HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend.” More contemporary music was added as he moved into the drawing stages, with songs “that captured the spirit of the time without being too concerned with the anachronistic side of it. I suppose I was thinking of the soundtracks to things like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby.”
Readers can enjoy the playlist along with the graphic novel itself when Suzanne: The Jazz Age Goddess of Tennis becomes available in September. You can pre-order your copy now from Avery Hill Publishing.
