At six weeks old, her parents took Stopes from Scotland;[4] the family stayed briefly in Colchester then moved to London, where in 1880 her father bought 28 Cintra Park in Upper Norwood.

Within the same year she won the Gilchrist scholarship from University College London,[7] with the help of Oliver and her geology professor, Edmund Garwood who provided incredible references.

A chance meeting with Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott during one of his fund-raising lectures in 1904 brought a possibility of proving Suess's theory.

Their findings led them to hypothesize that the coal balls native to the area were formed when marine water permeated carboniferous peat mires.

The most promising region at that time proved to be much closer to home, and on 22 March 1907, during the middle of a massive heat wave, Stopes and Watson departed for the Jurassic coast of northeast Scotland, to the coal-mining town of Brora, on the Moray Firth.

This form of geological prediction, 'geoprophesy' as Stopes called it, is formally known as biostratigraphy, and was originally formulated by 17th century Danish scientist Nicholas Steno.

Despite this setback, the flora fossils they did recover were the first Middle Jurassic period specimens to be uncovered in that region, and demonstrated a biostratigraphic link between the Scottish and north east English coasts.

Stopes also wrote a popular book on palaeobotany, "Ancient Plants" (1910; Blackie, London), in what was called a successful pioneering effort to introduce the subject to non-scientists.

When Binnie Dunlop, secretary of the Malthusian League, introduced her to Humphrey Verdon Roe—Stopes's future second husband—in 1917, she received the boost that helped her publish her book.

Married Love was published on 26 March 1918; that day, Stopes was visiting Humphrey Roe, who had just returned with a broken ankle from service during the First World War after his aeroplane crashed.

Although many considered Stopes' advocacy of birth control to be scandalous, Wise Parenthood printed ten editions and was a successful sequel to Married Love.

The following year, Stopes published A Letter to Working Mothers on how to have healthy children and avoid weakening pregnancies, a condensed version of Wise Parenthood aimed at the poor.

[29] Aylmer Maude, acclaimed writer and Tolstoy expert, was brought into the home of Stopes and Gates in an effort to support their financial needs.

When Stopes blamed Maude for the book's poor sales, he replied: "you so impressed on me the importance of getting the Life out quickly, and I evidently rushed it to the point of scamping it and failed to correct some of the errors in your rough draft.

[34] When Stopes had sufficiently recovered, she returned to work in 1920; she engaged in public speaking and responding to letters seeking advice on marriage, sex and birth control.

[38] The bishops were not receptive; among the resolutions carried during the conference was one aimed against "the deliberate cultivation of sexual union" and another against "indecent literature, suggestive plays and films [and] the open or secret sale of contraceptives".

[45] Stopes explained that the object of the Society was: "...to counteract the steady evil which has been growing for a good many years of the reduction of the birth rate just on the part of the thrifty, wise, well-contented, and the generally sound members of our community, and the reckless breeding from the C.3 end, and the semi-feebleminded, the careless, who are proportionately increasing in our community because of the slowing of the birth rate at the other end of the social scale.

Stopes's work had been associated with Charles Bradlaugh, who had been convicted of obscenity 45 years earlier when he had republished an American Malthusian text in Britain, which "advocated and gave explicit information about contraceptive methods".

[70] In her biography of Stopes, June Rose claimed "Marie was an elitist, an idealist, interested in creating a society in which only the best and beautiful should survive,"[71][72] a view echoed by Richard A. Soloway in the 1996 Galton Lecture: "If Stopes's general interest in birth control was a logical consequence of her romantic preoccupation with compatible sexuality within blissful marriage, her particular efforts to provide birth control for the poor had far more to do with her eugenic concerns about the impending 'racial darkness' that the adoption of contraception promised to illuminate.

"[74] Stopes's enthusiasm for eugenics and race improvement was in line with many intellectuals and public figures of the time: for example Havelock Ellis, Cyril Burt and George Bernard Shaw.

[78] The objects of the Society For Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress expressed the eugenic aims of the Mothers' Clinic,[79] summarised in Tenet 16: "In short, we are profoundly and fundamentally a pro-baby organisation, in favour of producing the largest possible number of healthy, happy children without detriment to the mother, and with the minimum wastage of infants by premature deaths.

The first of these was ignorance and the second was the "inborn incapacity which lies in the vast and ever increasing stock of degenerate, feeble-minded and unbalanced who are now in our midst and who devastate social customs.

"[84] Stopes then stated that "a few quite simple acts of Parliament" could deal with "this prolific depravity" through sterilisation by x-rays and assured the reader that "when Bills are passed to ensure the sterility of the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased, and to provide for the education of the child-bearing woman so that she spaces her children healthily, our race will rapidly quell the stream of the depraved, hopeless and wretched lives which are at present increasing in proportion in our midst".

[86] In November 1922, just before the general election, she sent a questionnaire to parliamentary candidates asking that they sign a declaration that: "I agree that the present position of breeding chiefly from the C3 population and burdening and discouraging the A1 is nationally deplorable, and if I am elected to Parliament I will press the Ministry of Health to give such scientific information through the Ante-natal Clinics, Welfare Centres and other institutions in its control as will curtail the C3 and increase the A1".

[91] In 1934, an interview published in the Australian Women's Weekly disclosed her views on mixed-race marriages: she advised correspondents against them and believed that all half-castes should be sterilized at birth... "thus painlessly and in no way interfering with the individual's life, the unhappy fate of he who is neither black nor white is prevented from being passed on to yet unborn babes.

Nurses at Stopes' clinic had to sign a declaration not to "impart any information or lend any assistance whatsoever to any person calculated to lead to the destruction in utero of the products of conception".

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.

Her first major success was Our Ostriches, a play that dealt with society's approach to working class women being forced to produce babies throughout their lives.

[108] Stopes published several volumes of poetry, including Man and Other Poems (1913), Love Songs for Young Lovers (1939), Oriri (1940), and Joy and Verity (1952).

[112] In 1923, Marie Stopes bought the Old Higher Lighthouse on the Isle of Portland, Dorset, as an escape from the difficult climate of London during her court case against Halliday Sutherland.