[STOPES, Marie] (pseud. Erica FAY); Arthur RACKHAM (illustrator). A Road to Fairyland.

Sexologist-Turned-Children’s Author

[STOPES, Marie] (pseud. Erica FAY); Arthur RACKHAM (illustrator). A Road to Fairyland. London & New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1926.

8vo. Publisher’s grey cloth lettered in dark blue to upper board and spine, top-edge stained blue, second state dust-jacket priced at 2/6 to spine; pp. [10], 219, [1 (blank)], colour frontispiece by Arthur Rackham; large type; toning to jacket, spine slightly frayed at head (later tape repair to interior), boards slightly creased; slight creasing to lower corner of pp. 83–95 with tape repair to p. 83, offsetting from jacket to endpapers; a very good copy; presentation inscription to front free endpaper dated November 1933 (see below).

First edition of these fairy tales for children by the pioneer of birth control Marie Stopes, published pseudonymously and inscribed ‘To Pat | with best wishes | from the author’.

Stopes rose to notoriety following the publication of Married Love (1918), which argued that to have a successful marriage a couple had to achieve sexual fulfilment and have access to birth control as well as a sense of gender equality. Following its publication, she opened the first family planning clinic in Europe with her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe. Stopes had long harboured literary ambitions, forming a friendship (albeit an uneasy one) with H.G. Wells. The pseudonymous publication of the present work indicates the expansion of her work from the purely scientific to the literary, as well as a desire to distance herself from the controversial opinions attached to her own name as well as her ‘increasingly dogmatic’ views (ODNB).

Her turn to children’s books was perhaps also inspired by the birth of her son, Harry Verdon Stopes-Roe, in 1924. By 1926, she was experiencing growing ‘difficulties in co-operating with other workers in the birth control movement (she seceded from the National Birth Control Association in the early 1930s) led her into an ever more isolated position’. (ibid.).

As well as A Road to Fairyland, she also authored the children’s play Buckie’s Bears as well as the 1928 novel Love’s Creation, the latter published under her mother’s maiden name, Carmichael.

See Briant, Marie Stopes: A Biography (1962).

SKU: 2124574