Maggs Bros.

Inscribed by the author: “Dr. Marie Stopes, with kind regards from Havelock Ellis”. Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex made Stopes feel “choked and dirty for three months” and “Like breathing a bag of soot”. Stopes, of course, had already published controversial studies on birth control and marriage by the time of this inscription and the volume contains a number of her pencilled underlinings and emphases, with three textual holograph remarks: “Good!” in the preface, then “untrue of all but abnormal” on page 49 and, finally, “how can you say this in the face of married love?”, after Ellis’s statement that “The erotic claims of women … are not publicly voiced”. Both Stopes and Ellis were followers of eugenics, but only managed one child between them - her first marriage was never consummated and Ellis was effectively impotent. Stopes disowned her son (by her second marriage), ostensibly for marrying a woman with short-sightedness, an hereditary disorder. An excellent copy.