Marie Stopes - Literary Stopes

Literary Stopes

Stopes knew many famous people of her age. Among them were writers such as George Bernard Shaw with whom she corresponded for many decades, Aylmer Maude another lifelong correspondent, H.G. Wells with whom she had stormy discussions, Noël Coward who wrote a humorous ditty about her, and Lord Alfred Douglas whose letters she edited. (She unsuccessfully petitioned Neville Chamberlain to obtain a civil list pension for Douglas: the signitaries included Arthur Quiller-Couch, John Gielgud, Evelyn Waugh and Virginia Woolf.) Muriel Spark, then general secretary of the Poetry Society, had an altercation with the birth control champion and lamented "that Stopes's mother had not been better informed on the subject."

This was Coward's hymn to Marie Stopes:

If through a mist of awful fears
Your mind in anguish gropes,
Dry up your panic-stricken tears
And fly to Marie Stopes.

If you have missed life's shining goal
And mixed with sex perverts and Dopes,
For normal soap to cleanse your soul
Apply to Marie Stopes.

And if perhaps you fail all round
And lie among your shattered hopes,
Just raise your body from the ground,
And crawl to Marie Stopes.

Stopes herself wrote plays and poetry. Starting during the First World War she wrote plays on themes that became more didactic until her major success in 1923, a play called Our Ostriches, which dealt with society's shortsighted approach to working class women forced to produce babies all their lives. The play ran for three months at the Royal Court Theatre. The play was hurriedly produced in place of another Stopes play, called Vectia. This was a strongly autobiographical play, which attempted to analyze the failure of her first marriage. As it dealt with sex and impotence, the play never received a licence to be performed, despite Stopes' frequent efforts over the following years. Vectia she had printed in 1926 under the title A Banned Play and a Preface on Censorship. Her later plays did not reach the stage.

In her later years, with the war for birth control won, she published several volumes of poetry.