The Alternative Autograph Book
ELLIS, Mrs Havelock. The Lover's Calendar. London: Keegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd.1912.
8vo. Original red cloth lettered in gilt to spine and in blind to front board; pages untrimmed, one uncut; pp. [x], 423 [1]; front board lightly stained with black and a touch sunned to spine; light offsetting to free endpapers; otherwise, a good copy.
First edition. The women's rights activist Marie Stopes’ copy with her bookplate to the front endpaper. With a warm inscription from her friend, the novelist, Mollie Stanley-Wrench, “To dear Marie – with Mollie’s love and friendship 19, VI. 1927”.
Marie Stopes used The Lover’s Calendar from 1927-1950 as an intimate method of recalling the birthdays of friends, as well as an alternative form of autograph book. Beneath 65 of the poems is an inscription or signature of an acquaintance as well as 30 additional names in Stopes’ own hand.
It is a unique document of people regarded as noteworthy to Stopes, not only preserving dates of significance, but also chronicling and illuminating personal relationships. The inclusion of lovers – her future biographer, Keith Briant), family (her influential parents Charlotte and Henry are both tipped in, feminist contemporaries (including suffragette Edith Ayrton Zangwill), alongside the writer E. M. Forster (on January 1st) – paint a vivid picture of Stopes' intellectual and emotional landscape. Significantly, the volume includes the signature of Lord Alfred Douglas (October 22nd), the lover of Oscar Wilde about whom Stopes wrote a biography.
Although the majority of Stopes’ notes are in pencil, she has written her own name in ink on her birthday. The only other inked note, on August 17th, records the birthday of her godson – son of Keith Briant and actress Elizabeth Nolan, Shane Briant, who later appeared in four Hammer Horror films; Demons of the Mind, Straight on Till Morning, Captain Kronos- Vampire Hunter and Frankenstein and The Monster from Hell.
Provenance: From the estate of Harry Verdon Stopes-Roe (Marie Stope’s son) and his wife, Mary Stopes-Roe (formerly Mary Wallis, daughter of engineer and scientist Sir Barnes Neville Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb).
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