This post was originally published on Audible.com.
In 1926, when female boxer Annie Newton announced she would fight another woman in London, the public outcry was immediate—not because she was boxing, but because her opponent was female. The match was canceled, and Newton nearly disappeared from history. Now, Courtney Ellis's historical novel Flyweight resurrects this forgotten scandal through the eyes of two freshly imagined fictional women inspired by real life, asking urgent questions about who gets to use their body, and for what purpose.
Tricia Ford: Women's boxing has such a fascinating and tumultuous history. What true events inspired Flyweight, and how did you balance historical accuracy with the needs of your fictional narrative?
Courtney Ellis: In 1926, a female boxer in London named Annie Newton announced that she would be competing in an exhibition match against another woman. The match was reported in the newspapers, and public outcry flooded in the very next day. Though Annie had fought in exhibition matches against men, it was thought to be uncouth and dangerous for two women to box one another. In a post-war world where women were being pressured to return to their traditional gender roles, the match caused a nationwide scandal, and as a result, was eventually canceled. I wanted to follow the events quite closely, so I used newspaper articles from the time to track Annie’s journey. But because a fictionalized version of Annie wouldn’t have gone through much of a transformation, it was important for me to introduce an original character. That’s how Lucy was born.
She enters the story as someone who loves the sport, but who still clings to traditional ideas of where women fit in the world. Siobhan, the character who is inspired by Annie, then acts as her mentor. Since there was very little information to be found about Annie Newton and her opponent, Madge Baker, it made sense for me and for the narrative to change names and give myself creative freedom to fill in those gaps in a way that made for a more dramatic story. I moved the entire story closer to the First World War, to 1921, so that I could really home in on those rippling effects the war left on England.
The striking fact that women boxers didn't achieve million-dollar purses until 2022—nearly a century after men—puts Lucy and Siobhan's fight in stark perspective. As you researched the trajectory of women's boxing, what surprised or angered you most?
It is a staggering fact, isn’t it? In the US, women weren’t granted professional boxing licenses until the 1970s, and in the UK, not until the 1990s, and in both instances, that right was hard-won. But the biggest surprise for me was finding out that women’s boxing didn’t become an Olympic sport until 2012. That feels so incredibly recent! Perhaps it was my own naivety, but I had always thought of the Olympics as a place where women athletes were more present and more respected than in, say, professional sports. A lot of anger followed as I began going through newspaper archives and reading what people had to say about Annie Newton’s boxing match; that emotion I felt was the main reason I wanted to include some of these articles in the novel, word for word.
From our modern perspective, reading women’s boxing described as “a disgusting spectacle” and “pandering to the grossest side of human nature” is pretty shocking, and for someone writing in a post-Roe America, the blatant policing of women’s bodies, and what men believed they ought and ought to not use them for, hit especially hard.
She has to learn, like so many of us, that recognizing injustice and inequality is crucial, but while fighting back against it, we also have to preserve the thing we are fighting for—those small human joys that make life worth living.
As a writer, how did you maintain hope in the story while staying true to the harsh realities of poverty in 1920s East London?
Finding that balance was one of the trickiest challenges of writing this novel. Hope was present in all the memoirs and accounts I read of life in impoverished East London. While there was certainly distrust among some, particularly around immigrants, the struggle of living in poverty seemed to bring people together. It’s often the people with little to spare that can be the most generous. These people understood that nobody was coming to rescue them, that they had to rely on each other in times of hardship. Multiple families lived in extremely close quarters, and so it was nearly impossible to ignore a sick child or a struggling mother. There was a real sense of community, and neighbors came together to help pay for a funeral or clothe a new baby. But, of course, life was incredibly difficult.
It would be unfair to focus only on the hope, and deny that families were barely scraping by, that their work was laborious, dangerous, and underpaid, that living conditions were poor, that there were issues of domestic violence and rampant illness, and in this particular post-war period, immense grief over the loss of husbands, sons, fathers—oftentimes a family’s main breadwinner. A lot of this friction ended up being a part of Lucy’s character arc. She feels incredibly displeased with her family’s situation, and rightly so, but that displeasure begins to show in her relationships and she has to learn how to hold anger and love at the same time. She has to learn, like so many of us, that recognizing injustice and inequality is crucial, but while fighting back against it, we also have to preserve the thing we are fighting for—those small human joys that make life worth living. It’s a difficult thing! I’m learning those lessons myself.
Lucy comes from privilege but loses everything when she marries for love. What drew you to explore this intersection of class conflict and romantic choice in post-WWI England? Did you encounter any surprising historical details about cross-class marriages during your research?
I write about this conflict in all of my books, and I suppose at first, I was swept up by the romance of it all. But there is more to it than that. Privileged women didn’t have much agency in marriage. They were expected to make a match with a man who was of better or equal standing as her father, which often meant that love was not a consideration. For a man, marrying outside of class might mean no dowry, but for a woman, it meant living in an entirely different world than the one she grew up in, where she would be expected to work, to clean, to cook. For someone like Lucy, it would have been a sacrifice of comfort in the name of love, which is certainly a romantic idea.
But she feels like an outsider in the East End—she isn’t familiar with community, doesn’t quite know how to fit in, and her privilege makes it difficult for her to understand how anyone could live happily under poverty, which is rather insulting to those around her. She learns that the money her husband made from his boxing career would never be enough to clear away what her father considers to be a stain of his past in the workhouse. Class consciousness is one of the reasons I keep coming back to this time period. In the First World War, when junior officers from upper-class families died beside working men, the lines of class began to blur. I find the social history really fascinating, and romance and marriage is just one of the many lenses through which to explore it.
Siobhan is a groundbreaking character—a woman who not only boxes but owns a gym. What historical figures or records helped you craft her character?
As I mentioned before, Siobhan’s character was crafted from what I knew about Annie Newton. While Annie didn’t own the business, she trained and taught boxing at the gym that belonged to her uncle, Professor Andrew Newton. After losing two husbands in the war, she was able to do the thing she loved while earning money to support her daughter. One of the reasons why I wanted to fictionalize her in the form of Siobhan was because I didn’t have all that much information to go on. There were several interviews with her around the time of the boxing match scandal, which gave me a sense of her courage, her brassy personality, and wit, but these articles were also inconsistent, and unfortunately, it seemed like once the media moved on from her, she disappeared from public record. I’ve seen her name pop up in a few other texts, but it seems like every researcher and writer used the same sources as I did.
So who was Annie before that match? And after? What was she feeling during this time, reading about herself in the papers? That is where I came in as the writer and tried to fill in the blanks by imagining myself in her shoes. Changing her name and altering some of her background was a way for me to separate my character from Annie so that I could honor Annie without creating inaccuracies or running the risk of writing a flat heroine.
Your background is in publishing, and you have a BA in English and creative writing. How did your career in publishing influence your approach to crafting this novel?
I worked for an academic publisher for several years, and it was a solid place for me to stand while I continued my writing journey. It was incredible to work with like-minded people who were all in the business because of how truly passionate they were about books and education. While academic publishing is a bit different from trade, my experience with the inner workings of the industry definitely helped me find my footing when I entered the world as an author. Publishing is sort of like an iceberg—there is so much going on under the surface! So I was grateful to have had that context when I got my first book deal. And as a historical fiction writer, I had the excellent perk of having free access to thousands of nonfiction titles and databases of academic writing to use for my research. Oftentimes, I’d scroll through some of the more niche history titles, seeking out new ideas and corners of history that were yet to be explored in fiction. I was able to attend academic conferences and meet a lot of fascinating people.
I think fiction is an accessible way for people to learn more about history, not as statistics or cold facts, but from the perspective of the people who lived through it.
What's next for you? Do you think you’ll write more historical fiction? Are there other overlooked stories of women pushing boundaries that you're eager to explore?
I’m certainly writing more historical fiction! History is so important—it reminds us of where we’ve come from, explains the mistakes we make as humans, and teaches us how to avoid repeating them. I think fiction is an accessible way for people to learn more about history, not as statistics or cold facts, but from the perspective of the people who lived through it. Understanding the pain of hunger, the exhaustion of factory work, the fear of losing a child—that helps to teach empathy. And oftentimes, women, people of color, and LGBTQ folks are left out of history books. It’s really important to help bring those lesser-known stories to light. I can’t deny that I will always be drawn to the period surrounding the First World War; I’d love to start exploring more about what was going on in the US during that time. But I also have a lot of curiosity about other periods and would love to explore beyond this little niche of mine. So, I’m far from finished!
