Marie Stopes

BOOK: Moderate Shelf Rub to Boards; Spine Slightly Cocked; Edges Moderately Soiled; Slight Yellowing Due to Age. DUST JACKET: Previous Owner Markings (Price Clipped); Repaired; Lightly Creased; Lightly Chipped; Slight Yellowing Due to Age; In Archival Quality Jacket Cover. ISBN: 0 233 96879 2 (Copyright Page)/233 96879 2 (Dust Jacket). SUB-TITLE: a biography. FRONT OF JACKET: Marie Stopes, photographed in 1915. CONTENTS: Illustrations; Author's Note; 1 Birth of a Superior Brain 2 False Starts 3 A Northern Experiment 4 East and West 5 A Fate Worse than Death 6 Gates v. Gates 7 Alone in the Wilderness 8 "Married Love" 9 Married Love? 10 Bell, Book and Candle 11 Improving God's Handiwork 12 God Fights Back 13 The Great Trial 14 A Son is Born 15 Unenduring Passion 16 "Remember My Sweet Youth" 17 Intimations of Mortality 18 Surprised by Death; References; Select Bibliography; Index. SYNOPSIS: Jeanie, Jeanie, full of hopes, Read a book by Marie Stopes, Now, to judge by her condition, She must have read the wrong edition--so London schoolchildren were chanting in 1924, an indication of how famous Marie Stopes's pioneering work on sex education and birth control had made her. She was denounced as an enemy of the Empire (worse than Hitler and Goebbels, said an Australian MP); she was attacked by the Catholic Church; Bernard Shaw dubbed her "Dottissima"; and countless thousands of ordinary people blessed her for freeing their lives from the consequences of Victorian prudery. She herself believed that she was as great a poet as Shakespeare and the recipient of messages from God. Her own life had been seriously blighted by an upbringing so puritanical that it took her, a passionate young woman, three years to realize that her first husband was impotent. Her career was determined by her extraordinary private life, and her success in it was due as much to her eccentricities as to her great abilities. She was a bizarre as she was important, and she kept every scrap of paper: a biographer's dreamthough her two earlier biographers, both intimate friends of hers who felt obliged to show her much as she saw herself, were unable to take advantage of the wealth of source material. Only now, in Ruth Hall, has her life found a chronicler worthy of it who has been given access to everything. Carefully researched, perceptive, and very entertaining, this book makes the enthralling best of its astonishing subject. It is illustrated with photographs from the collection of Mr Harry Stopes-Roe, Marie Stopes's son, many of them hitherto unpublished. Born in 1933, in Sheffield, Ruth Hall is the daughter of Jack Clark, a holloware buffer in the local steelworks, and Ethel Ford, a miner's daughter. She inherited a musical talent from her father, but there were no facilities for a training in music available so she took a scholarship to a grammar school, followed by another to Nottingham University where she read English. After teaching for a year, then working as public relations officer for the Calico Printers' Association in Manchester, she became a reporter for the Glasgow Herald, first in Glasgow, then in London. For a time music drew her away from journalism, and she went to study harpsichord with Rafael Puyana in Paris. Finding herself not quite so gifted as she had believed, she returned to working for newspapers--the Sunday Times, the New Statesman and the Observer colour magazine which, with its series on British history, first stimulated her interest in Marie Stopes. Ruth Hall is an authority on Byron and has written a screenplay about him which she describes as 'slightly longer than War and Peace'. She is married to Ron Hall, a newspaper executive with the Sunday Times, and now divides her time between music and writing. She feels that writing will probably win. Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.…