Anna Trench’s football love story Florrie unearths the hidden history of the women’s game

London-based illustrator and writer Anna Trench has always been in awe of how images and words can form a careful symphony to tell a story. Growing up, she held cartoons and comics close, but it wasn’t until her late teens till she discovered graphic novels aimed at adults, such as Posy Simmonds’ and Alison Bechdel’s, that she realised “the form felt perfect” for her, she says.

But comics weren’t the creative’s first and only love. There was always something else – football. Out on the pitch since primary school, Anna played on teams throughout her early years and into university, finding close friends at Falmouth and Cambridge on the field, and even meeting her partner “under the floodlights of the astroturf”, she tells us.

Anna is still playing (for London club Goal Diggers FC, if you were curious) and her football obsession has recently found a wonderful crossover with her illustration career in Florrie, the creative’s queer graphic novel set around the FA’s 1921 ban on women playing football, published by Penguin.

A story of a female footballer, as well as an outline of the hidden history of the women’s game, the inspiration for her debut graphic novel was sparked a few years ago when Anna was thinking about the 1921 ban on women playing on FA-affiliated pitches. “I started looking closely at team photos from that time and found them incredibly moving: the keen faces, muddy knees, and striped shirts of the players. I wondered what happened to all those women who had so many possibilities opened up for them, only to be shut down.”

A name that kept coming up on old women’s team sheets Anna uncovered in her research was Florrie, so the illustrator decided to create a fictional character with the title to create an adventure that would touch on both real and fictional events rooted in the period: “huge crowds at matches in London and Preston, international fixtures, dances at lesbian club Le Monocle in Paris and the devastating consequences of a ban on women playing a game deemed ‘unsuitable’ for women.”

The novel follows Florrie’s great-niece who discovers she was secretly a footballing legend in the early 20th century, and unearths Florrie’s hidden history “both on and off the pitch” – a narrative that “has some overlap with my experience of playing football, and with that of many players I know”, Anna tells us. The illustrator slowly formed the visual world of the book from a host of old photographs of even the smallest historical details to inform her drawing, like “berets the 1920s Parisian football players wore to the rides running at Blackpool Pleasure Beach in 1921”, she says.

An ode to unforgettable women in the sport, and a beautiful queer love story, Anna’s only hope for her debut graphic novel is that its tale touches readers with “the joy of playing football, the feeling of first love, and the discovery and celebration of a past that should be better known”.