Cicely Hamilton's work as a woman suffrage playwright and polemicist between 1908 and 1914 and her involvements with the Women Writers' Suffrage League, Actresses' Franchise League, and Edith Craig's Pioneer Players have been the principal objects of scholarly interest in her. Since 1979 Hamilton's plays Diana of Dobson's (1908), How the Vote Was Won (1909), and A Pageant of Great Women (1909); her feminist tract Marriage as a Trade (1909); and her illustrated satirical poem Beware! A Warning--to Suffragists (circa 1909) have been reprinted, either alone or in anthologies, but her novels have been neglected. The selectivity of critical interest in Hamilton has obscured her achievements in fiction and has only partially recontextualized her writing historically.

Born in London on 15 June 1872, Cicely Mary Hammill was the eldest child of Denzill and Maud Hammill. Her father was a captain in the Gordon Highlanders who rose to the rank of major general before moving on to a diplomatic...