Charlotte Carmichael Stopes

[2] She had the desire to become a writer, devising stories for her brothers and sisters when she was a child and at twenty-one publishing a collection, Alice Errol and Other Tales.

[4] In 1865 Sarah Mair founded the Ladies' Edinburgh Debating Society, which published a regular writing journal, The Attempt.

In a meeting of the society in 1867 Mary Crudelius presented her initiative of creating classes for women at a university level under the auspices of the Edinburgh Ladies' Educational Association.

[9] At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1889, Stopes stunned the proceedings by organizing an impromptu session where she introduced rational dress to a wide audience, her speech being noted in newspapers across Britain.

She also attempted to gain a retrospective degree, denied to her at the time of her studies, but she needed a further two courses not included in her certificate.

These courses however clashed, so she could not do them in a single year and she abandoned the attempt,[11] returning to London to take up lodgings in Torrington Square close to the British Museum, where she was able to better follow her Shakespearean research.

[14] Laura E Nym Mayhall observes that British Freewomen was 'perhaps the single most influential text in casting women's struggle for the vote within the radical narrative of loss, resistance and recovery' since Stopes' arguments, as outlined in successive editions of British Freewomen, were frequently cited by 'suffragists of all stripes in making the case for women's suffrage in print, before crowds, and in the courtroom'.

Her first book was The Bacon/Shakespeare Question, published in 1888: refuting the popular speculation that Francis Bacon was the actual author of Shakespeare's plays.

Stopes received the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize from the British Academy in 1916 for her Shakespearian research, thirteen years before her death in February 1929.

Her financial difficulties were partly alleviated at the end of 1903 when she was awarded a government pension of £50 a year "in consideration of her literary work, especially in connection with the Elizabethan period".

[19] Charlotte Stopes died on 6 February 1929 in Worthing, Sussex at the age of 89, from bronchitis and cerebral thrombosis, and was buried at Highgate Cemetery.