She was the daughter of British irrigation engineer, General Sir Arthur Cotton, and spent her childhood in Madras, India, while her father supervised water management and canal projects in Andhra Pradesh.

[4] In 1869 the family settled in Dorking, Surrey, about 30 miles from Downe, home of Charles Darwin—where Elizabeth began evangelistic and philanthropic work, first organising a Sunday school and then a "Coffee-Room" where food and non-alcoholic drinks were served.

[5] (Florence Nightingale distributed copies of Cotton's book Our Coffee-Room and established her own coffee room in her village of Whatstandwell in Derbyshire.

[8] In 1877, at the age of 35, Cotton married a widower, retired Admiral Sir James Hope, an evangelical and a temperance advocate who was 34 years her senior.

Thereafter Lady Hope opened several additional coffee houses and settled in London where she became involved in the work of the Golden Bells Mission in Notting Hill Gate.

[9] She was a prolific author of more than thirty books that "dealt with evangelistic and temperance themes," many containing "personal anecdotes reminiscent of the Darwin story.

[11] In 1903, she opened her largest temperance hostel, the Connaught Club in Marble Arch, which offered accommodation for several hundred men.

Lady Hope's story first appeared in an American Baptist newspaper, the Watchman-Examiner, on 15 August 1915, the story preceded by a four-page report on the summer Bible conference held in Northfield, which that year ran from 30 July to 15 August 1915: It was one of those glorious autumn afternoons, that we sometimes enjoy in England, when I was asked to go in and sit with the well known professor, Charles Darwin.

Propped up by pillows, he was gazing out on a far-stretching scene of woods and cornfields, which glowed in the light of one of those marvellous sunsets which are the beauty of Kent and Surrey.

I made some allusions to the strong opinions expressed by many persons on the history of the creation, its grandeur, and then their treatment of the earlier chapters of the Book of Genesis.

A.T. Robertson, who had given a lecture at the Northfield Conference on the same day as Lady Hope,[16] received a letter about her story from an acquaintance in Toronto who claimed to have known her back in London and had little confidence in "her judgement or her imagination".

"[19] In 1922, Darwin's daughter, Henrietta Litchfield, said she did not believe Lady Hope had ever seen her father and that "he never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier.

We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A."[20] Leonard, Darwin's last surviving child, dismissed Lady Hope's account as a "hallucination" (1930) and "purely fictitious" (1934).

[21] Lady Hope gave the fullest account of her story in a letter written (circa 1919–20) to S. James Bole, who first published it in 1940.

[22] The story became a popular legend, and Hope's claims were republished as late as October 1955 in the Reformation Review and in the Monthly Record of the Free Church of Scotland in February 1957.

In contrast, Fegan noted that after Hope had been "adjudicated bankrupt," she had asked him for "a commendatory letter to take with her to America, and it was my painful duty to tell her that I did not feel I could do so.

Years of tract and novel writing had made her a skilled raconteur, able to summon up poignant scenes and conversations, and embroider them with sentimental spirituality.