Nor All Thy Tears

This chapter examines Boyle’s novel Nor All Thy Tears and argues that the book’s links to the suffrage movement are clear. The novel pays tribute to Eunice Guthrie Murray, a fellow suffragette and novelist. The dedication reads: ‘To […] my friend, this story of a day long gone is affectionately dedicated’. The implied distance here in ‘a day long gone’ speaks to two aspects that are pertinent to the text: firstly the novel is less closely aligned with the thriller form of the 1920s which Boyle echoes in her first two novels and instead reaches back to the late-Victorian forms of Boyle and Guthrie Murray’s youth, and secondly, it speaks of the suffrage campaign days themselves—as suggested by the last line of the dedication. Indeed, ‘a day long gone’ suggests that Boyle is historicising and perhaps metaphorically appraising the early twentieth-century Women’s Movement itself, asserting her own (and her friend’s) place within it but also acknowledging its passing. Although the book doesn’t directly deal with the suffrage movement, it certainly details several other pertinent women’s issues that initially drove parts of the movement—focusing on those that lost public interest once the vote was secured.