ABSTRACT
This chapter will focus on the experience of three women who were born in the 1880s: Phyllis Bottome and Helen Corke, both born in 1882, and Marie Stopes, born in 1880. Phyllis Bottome, in adulthood a minor novelist, was born in 1882, and grew up in an upper-middle-class family. Bottome’s analysis of her father and mother was influenced by her psychoanalytic perspective. During Phyllis’s first eight years, when her father held two successive country livings, the family lived in conventional upper-middle-class country-house style, although, except during periods of acute illness, Phyllis’s mother was more closely involved with her children than many Victorian upper-middle-class mothers. Helen Corke, like Phyllis Bottome, was also born in 1882. In contrast to Bottome, her family was lower-middle-class. Helen was the eldest child and only daughter in a family of three children. In her early childhood, young Helen and her brothers were cared for both by her mother and by the maid.
