The Life and Times of Stella Browne

This is the first full length biography of radical reformer Stella Browne, whose life, ideas and activities overturn so many assumptions about early twentieth-century politics and feminism. Stella Brown offers her biographer a window onto many neglected areas of twentieth-century history, and this context is vividly brought to life in this book. Lesley Hall's biography explores Stella Browne's life and times, from her upbringing in Nova Scotia into her political apprenticeship and life from militant suffragism in the early 1900s through her internationalism and involvement with Margaret Sanger and the birth control and sex-reform movements, her work among pacifist, Communist and feminist circles in North America, the UK and Continental Europe. Her relations with such as Rebecca West, Winifred Holtby, Havelock Ellist, Dora Russell and C.K.Ogden are central to the biography. Based on extensive and new research in primary sources in Britain, Europe and North America and on Stella Browne's own copious (and scattered) writings, this biography gives as rounded a portrait as is possible of this vivid and original woman, whose life and ideas are shown to have been well before her time.