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Alfred Sutro, Marie Stopes, and her Vectia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Lewis Sawin
Lewis Sawin
Affiliation:
Lewis Sawin is Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
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Extract

A somewhat unlikely conjunction of personalities involving Marie Stopes, well-known sexologist and birth control advocate, and Alfred Sutro, writer of society dramas for London's West End, occurred during the last weeks of 1927. Part of the story has been told by Marie Stopes's biographer Ruth Hall, but hitherto unpublished letters from the vast Stopes Collection and elsewhere fill in the outlines of the brief, revealing encounter.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Spring 1985 , pp. 59 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1985

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References

Notes

1. Hall, Ruth, Passionate Crusader: The Life of Marie Stopes (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977).Google Scholar

2. Hall, , p. 89.Google Scholar

3. Hall, , p. 91.Google Scholar The author, Edward Carpenter, was himself homosexual.

4. Hall, , p. 118.Google Scholar

5. Hall, , p. [5].Google Scholar

6. Hall, , p. 95.Google ScholarMaude, Aylmer, the real-life ‘other man’Google Scholar, was, among other things the official translator and biographer of Tolstoy. He lived with Marie and her husband, Ruggles Gates. Later he wrote a biography of Marie Stopes.

7. Hall, , p. 95.Google Scholar

8. Ms Hall says it was in 1926 that Vectia ‘was ready for performance’ and Lord Cromer refused it a performing license (Hall, , p. 95)Google Scholar; but it seems clear that these events occurred in 1923. In her ‘Preface on the Censorship’ to Vectia, Marie Stopes tells us that when Vectia was banned, she wrote in one day a substitute, Dear Ostriches, which ‘was produced on the day appointed for Vectia.’ Stopes, Marie, A Banned Play [Vectia] and a Preface on the Censorship (London: John Bale Sons & Danielsson, 1926), pp. 4–6.Google Scholar Hall herself reports that ‘on 14 November 1923 … Our Ostriches opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London’ (Hall, , p. 247Google Scholar, a fact verified by Nicoll, Allardyce, English Drama 1900–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 970.Google Scholar

9. Stopes, , A Banned Play, pp. 44–5.Google Scholar

10. Hall, , p. 95.Google Scholar

11. From the Stopes Collection, BM Addl. MS 58505. The last paragraph of the letter is handwritten, the rest typed.

12. Also from the Stopes Collection.

13. The rough draft reads ‘gleaming in my eyes’ followed by a phrase which has been crossed out: ‘Flash & my voice run up & down the scale of indignation.’

14. The rough draft has ‘too’ between ‘side’ and ‘as’.

15. The rough draft has ‘annoyed’ instead of ‘enraged’.

16. In the rough draft two sentences follow ‘good’, but crossed out: ‘“Be good sweet maid & let who will be clever” was written in my album as a tiny & I'm sure it's true. I'd so like to be understood & loved while I'm alive as I think posterity could love me, only it will have forgotten all about me!’

17. From the Winton Dean Collection.

18. Also from the Stopes Collection.

19. The ‘revelation scene’ is probably autobiographical, up to a point. In her biography of Marie Stopes, Ruth Hall says, ‘The play is resolved, as it was in real life, by the lover [Heron/Maude] eliciting the truth about Vectia's sexual ignorance’; but that ‘revelation’ must have taken place many months before Marie and Gates parted, because she spent much time subsequent to the ‘revelation’ reading up on sex in the BM. I cannot, alas, confirm that the arranged appearance of infidelity in the play has its real-life parallel. Maude was living in the Gates house, until thrown out by Gates, and Gates did threaten to name Maude in a divorce.