Marie Stopes - Softcover

Rose, June

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0752442007 ISBN 13: 9780752442006

Publisher: History Press Ltd, 2007

Synopsis

'I am writing a book which will electrify England,' Marie Stopes told a friend, 'a book about the plain facts of marriage.' This book, Married Love, was published in 1918, sold over a million copies and was translated into thirteen languages. Yet its thirty-seven-year-old author, a lecturer in fossil plants, insisted she was still a virgin.

Marie Stopes went on to open the first free birth control clinic in the British Empire and to win international fame for her work. But while admired by Bernard Shaw, Lloyd George and much of the general public, her crusades aroused the violent opposition of the Roman Catholic Church and she became enmeshed in a series of sensational libel suits.

Orderly and brilliant as a scientist, Marie Stopes' emotional life reigned chaotic. She pursued a married Japanese professor to Japan, declared her Canadian husband impotent, and so exhausted her second husband that he consented, in writing, to allow her to take any lover she pleased. She remained bra-less and ardent until her late seventies. Drawing on family and personal letters and papers, a diary and Marie Stopes' unpublished novel, biographer June Rose throws new light on the interweaving of the public and personal life of a fascinating and formidable woman.

About this title

About the Author

June Rose is the author of several biographies, including Elizabeth Fry, the nineteenth-century prison reformer and Modigliani, the twentieth-century Italian painter and Susan Valadon: Mistress of Montmartre. She lives in Highgate, London.

Edition details

• Publisher: History Press Ltd
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0752442007
• ISBN 13: 9780752442006
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336