12. Married Love by Marie Stopes

Married Love (1918), Marie Stopes’ pioneering work on sex, was entitled in manuscript They Twain, and originally conceived as a romantic novel. These origins can still be glimpsed in the final text (‘The half-swooning sense of flux which overtakes the spirit in that eternal moment at the apex of rapture sweeps into its flaming tides the essence of the man and the woman…’); most of it was more down-to-earth, treating themes such as sexual anatomy, orgasm and contraception. Such a book, however, was a risk. Her fellow campaigner Charles Bradlaugh had been prosecuted for obscenity a few years earlier. By changing the title, making it clear that the book was not a salacious piece of pulp fiction but a respectable guide for the monogamous married, it survived the courts, sold in the millions throughout the world, and became probably the most sexually influential book of the twentieth century.

See a clickable index of all titles covered