Ada Nield Chew was one of many turn-of-the-century British women whose fiction-writing careers were both inspired and sustained by the political controversies of their day. Prior to earning a living through her fiction, journalism, and political activism during the prewar heyday of the suffrage campaign, Chew served on the Nantwich Board of Guardians, traveled with the Clarion van (a Socialist outfit) for a year (where she met her future husband, George Chew, in 1897), and worked for more than a decade with Mary MacArthur as a women's trade union organizer. She published articles in journals such as Common Cause (the journal of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, the most important nonmilitant suffrage organization in the Edwardian suffrage campaign), the Freewoman (a radical socialist-feminist periodical that, retitled the Egoist in 1914, subsequently became one of the chief venues of publication for modernists such as James Joyce and Ezra Pound...