London, December 24th.

“…I am glad that you are saving all your kisses for me when I come. By that time I shall be starving for kisses – so terribly hungry that you must kiss me very gently at first, or I will die – as a too hungry man must be fed very little at first.”

The fragment of this passionate letter was attributed to Mertyl Meredith, a young geologist from the U.K. The letter is part of ‘Love-Letters of a Japanese’, published in 1911. The book follows the affair between Mertyl and Kenjiro Watanabe, a fellow geologist whom she had met previously in Munich. The exchange of letters between the two took place over three consecutive Christmases. But while the letters are real, the true identity of the infatuated young “Mertyl” is revealed in the book’s foreword, written by none other than Marie Stopes herself.

Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on October 15, 1880. Her father, Henry Stopes, a brewer, architect and amateur paleontologist and archeologist, amassed the largest private collection of fossils and ancient stone tools in Britain. Her mother, Charlotte Carmichael, wrote British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege. The book, published in 1894, was a great influence on the early twentieth-century British women’s suffrage movement. They were both members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

She enrolled at University College London, where she studied botany and geology. She graduated with honors after only two years and received the Gold Medal in Botany. Shortly after, she went to study at the University of Munich and received a Ph.D. in palaeobotany in 1904. During that time, she met Professor Kenjiro Fujii, a distinguished botanist at the Imperial University of Tokyo, the real “Kenjiro Watanabe”.

In 1907, she convinced the Royal Society to fund an excursion to Japan, where Marie discovered some of the earliest fossilised angiosperms and some fossil insects from the Cretaceous period. These ancient specimens were embedded in the coal faces of Hokkaido’s deepest mines.

The affair between Marie and Kenjiro did not end well. The passionate relationship directly inspired Stopes’s Love-Letters of a Japanese, a work she drafted prior to the groundbreaking release of Married Love.

In 1957, Marie Stopes was diagnosed with cancer. She died on October 2, 1958.

References:

FALCON-LANG, H.J. & MILLER, R.F. 2007. Marie Stopes and the Fern Ledges of Saint John, New Brunswick. In Burek, C.V. (ed.) The Role of Women in the History of Geology. Special

Falcon-Lang, H.J., 2008. Marie Stopes: Passionate about Palaeobotany. Geology Today, 24: 132-136.

Mortlake, G. N. (Ed.). (1911). Love Letters of a Japanese. Stanley Paul & Company.