In December 1910 Marie Stopes was a confident and ambitious young scientist whose distinguished research record had attracted international attention within academic circles. She was not yet the bestselling author and magnet for public controversy that she would be by the end of the decade, but she was already well known. Her pioneering achievements as a woman scholar were of great interest to her mother's associates, and she had made a local impact in Manchester, where her public lectures on scientific advances were reported in the city press. Her promotion from the position of assistant lecturer or demonstrator to a full lectureship in 1909 was also publicly announced as part of the university news bulletin: ‘Miss Marie C. Stopes, D.Sc., Ph.D., has been appointed Special Lecturer in Palaeo-Botany in the University’. Interestingly her academic title of Dr Stopes was not used here, although her qualifications were given. By the time she left England for North America at the end of 1910 for the Fern Ledges project, she was already a celebrated British scientist. She had also begun to attract public interest through her first book about Japan.

That she had public literary ambitions from the start is evident from the number of non-specialist publications Marie produced, some of which were already in press before her first marriage to the Canadian geneticist Reginald Gates. The rapid demise of the marriage, in 1911, fostered her influential friendship with Aylmer Maude and propelled Marie into an unanticipated realm of public debate. If science had dominated the previous decade of her life, the spectacular drama of her personal life would colour the second.

After Marie's unfulfilled romance with Fujii, there had been flirtations with other men, and at least one woman. One of her admirers, Charlie Hewitt, wrote to his former fiancée that ‘I feel she is more in love with Love than with me.’