The late 1930s also saw the publication of Mitchison's political polemic, The Moral Basis of Politics. The Blood of the Martyr is in many ways a fictional exploration of the same themes.
Where, Mitchison asks, might we find a 'moral' answer to the threat posed by fascism and the increasing power of the Nation State over the rights of the individual?
She finds hope, if not quite the solution, in the resistance offered by the early Christians to Nero's persecution.
Dedicating her novel to political dissidents and minorities of her own time, she calls for a moral idea around which they too might unite to challenge the tyranny of State power in its characteristic twentieth-century forms.

Naomi Mitchison [1897-1999] was a literary phenomenon. Tireless in her writing, unafraid and often highly unconventional in her opinions, she left an extraordinary legacy. Her novels for adults and children stressed at different times her deep interest in historical and contemporary societies, as well her concerns for the future. She also travelled widely, wrote poetry and plays, memoirs, a war diary, book reviews, political articles, and many letters

Suzanne Hobson teaches twentieth-century literature in the department of English at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Angels of Modernism and Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Moderns and has published articles on Mitchison and a range of other women writers and intellectuals from the same period.