She was the daughter of Captain Charles Wesley Frazer, a representative of the Tennessee bar, and organizer of the Confederate Historical Relief Association in 1867, serving as its president during the last thirteen years of his life.

Boyle's grandparents Frazer, in 1822 crossed the Allegheny Mountains by wagon train from New Bern, North Carolina, which another ancestor had assisted in forming.

John A. Frazer had what was called "a hot foot" in the vernacular, and took his young wife from a position of luxury to endure the hardships of the pioneer.

In her first year in school, Boyle and other students reviewed the class textbook and then requested to drop the teaching of United States history.

[1] Boyle began writing verse at eight years of age and when she was fourteen, was contributing to various newspapers under a nom de guerre.

Boyle's first verses were written on the backs of her father's letters and were folded very small and tucked away in one corner of the nursery where a loose tack had been found in the carpet.

But Boyle had not taken into consideration the "spring cleaning", which included the taking up of that carpet; and the entire winter's efforts were swept into the fire by a broom.

[1] Boyle's grandmother in the paternal line was Frances Ann Frazer, well known as a writer of verse in the state of North Carolina.

A daughter of Grandmother Frazer also wrote poems in antebellum times for various newspapers and magazines, but it was always under a nom de plume, without pay, and shyly acknowledged.

Tearfully, a letter was written to the editor of Harper's, who returned the check with the simple statement that it was the policy of the magazine never to print anything unless it was paid for.

Boyle compromised by dividing equally the checks between the Young Woman's Boarding Home and the Leath Orphanage, both women enterprises.

[1] After high school graduation, Boyle did not go to college but, ambitious to continue her studies, she took up law, logic and belles lettres with her father and later passed collegiate examinations.

At her father's death in 1897, she had her husband quit claim to her, that she might deal as femme sole, and assumed entire charge of his estate.

As soon as her Drum and Fife Corps boys went to the Mexican border, Boyle set about the resuscitation of the local Red Cross, was made chairman of membership, and remained as such during the major portion of the war.

Her old editor, Robert Underwood Johnson, wired Boyle that he had put her on his central committee for the American Poets' Ambulance in Italy, which he and Henry van Dyke Jr. had just organized.

[1] Boyle was made a member of the Writers' Bureau of the Committee on Public Information, in Washington, D.C., which released articles for U.S. propaganda every few days.

Then the request for aid came from the Second and Fourth Districts of the Liberty Loan Drives, located respectively at Cleveland, Ohio and New York City.

Boyle was likewise the author of a book of verse entitled Love Songs and Bugle Calls, published in 1906, and one of her most interesting and widely read poems was "Embers of Glory".