Predicaments of love

Stopes's son. Surely, in this mass, "truth" must reside? But as Rose points out, in spite of this apparently comprehensive preservation, there are significant gaps where Stopes destroyed (actively or by neglect) important groups of correspondence. In her play Vectia she mythicized her relationship with Aylmer Maude, who actually lodged with Marie and her first husband during the tense period leading up to the collapse of their marriage, as "a pure and straightforward relationship" without "the smallest hint of flirtation or love-making". Her surviving letters to him do not entirely bear this out, but since his own to her do not survive, a haze of conjecture still shrouds the relationship. Even her most famous personal myth-that she married Ruggles Gates in complete sexual ignorance and took years, and a course of study in the "Cupboard" in the British Museum, to realize that the marriage was unconsummated-subjected to scrutiny is seen to lie at some angle to the truth. (Interesting questions are raised by the way Stopes dowered her alter-ego "Vectia" with "healthy natural desires" for normal marriage and motherhood, but could not permit a virtuous woman technical knowledge of what was wrong with her marriage.) This capacity to create herself was fundamental to Stopes's success: "without her urgent day-dreams, she might never have headed a great campaign" (p. 147). But unless she could head, or see herself as a leader, Stopes was not greatly interested in working for causes which did not benefit herself: her influence in the birth control movement waned in the 1930s as organization took over from taboo-breaching propaganda as the task of the hour. This is an illuminating biography of a woman who made history, but now, perhaps, attention should be turned to the quieter heroines of the birth control movement, and the stories of "those who have no historian" as Stopes herself described them: the thousands of grateful and desperate souls helped by her writings.