Introduction: Walking into the Future

In her campaigning years, Nina Boyle was a maverick who sat somewhere in between the different political wings of the suffrage movement, she resisted partisanship and thrived in company, embodying a heterodox and iconoclastic spirit—questioning every tenet she inherited and crossing almost every boundary she encountered, especially those of class, gender, and party politics. Later, she would also frequently disregard established (and emerging) gender and genre conventions in her fiction, writing a dozen novels in total. Like many committed suffrage campaigners, Boyle’s stated desire was always to move women’s rights beyond the right to vote, and she frequently uses fiction as a means of galvanising an audience and broaching subjects that were hard to get the public to engage with and that go beyond the issue of enfranchisement. This chapter sets out her aims and achievements as a campaigner and a writer and explores the need for further exploration of this forgotten writer.