‘From a Wife who Still Loves Him’
STOPES, Marie. Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties. London: A. C. Fifield. 1919.
8vo. Publisher’s maroon cloth, lettered in gilt to spine, wreath motif in blind to front board, typographic dust-jacket, untrimmed edges (partly unopened); pp. xvii, [1 (blank)], 124, [2 (publisher’s ads)], with one plate; some minor loss to upper spine (c. 13 x 13 mm) and corners of jacket, short closed tears to upper edge of front cover, some toning and a couple of scuffs, but generally a very good, clean copy; authorial inscription in ink to front free endpaper (see below).
Sixth and enlarged edition, this copy inscribed by Marie Stopes to her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe: ‘Returned to the Humples, on his | first wedding day anniversary. | 16 May 1919 | From a wife who still loves him’.
A notably poignant association copy inscribed early in the couple’s married life. When Stopes wrote this message, she would have been about four months pregnant. Sadly, the baby was born stillborn, probably due to complications from ‘Twilight Sleep’, then a new type of pain-relief drug used during labour. Unfortunately, her marriage to Roe broke down towards the end of the 1930s, with her husband granting her a ‘carte blanche to take a lover’ in 1938 (ODNB).
Humphrey Roe had been instrumental in the initial publication of Stopes’ highly successful and oft-reprinted work Married Love, putting £200 towards the first English publication with the minor publisher A. C. Fifield.
The publication of the book demonstrated to Stopes what she had long feared: the general population were ignorant about sex. Although she was morally opposed to divorce, she had her first marriage annulled on the grounds that it was never consummated. She wrote this book with this incident as a source of experience.
The sheer popularity of the book proved the need, and desire, for birth control clinics. Stopes and Roe opened the first birth control clinic in the British Empire on 17 March 1921, in London, Holloway. Small and plainly furnished, Stopes established the clinic in the hope that it might serve as a model to be rolled out throughout England. The inscription is particularly poignant, capturing the entwined intellectual and romantic relationship of Stopes and Roe and foreshadowing the breakdown of their marriage.
Provenance: From the estate of Harry Verdon Stopes-Roe (1924–2014), philosopher and vice-president of the British Humanist Association, son of Marie Stopes and Humphrey Verdon Roe.
See Briant, Marie Stopes: A Biography (1962).
SKU: 2122127