She was a British scholar, author, and campaigner for women's rights. She also published several books relating to the life and work of William Shakespeare. Her most successful publication was British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege (published 1894), a book which influenced and inspired the early twentieth century British women's suffrage movement. She married Henry Stopes, a palaeontologist, brewer and engineer. They produced two daughters, the eldest of whom was Marie Stopes, birth control advocate. She was born in Edinburgh to Christine Brown Graham Carmichael and James Ferrier Carmichael, a landscape painter, who died of tuberculosis when Stopes was fourteen. She had the desire to become a writer, devising stories for her brothers and sisters when she was a child and at twenty-one publishing a collection, Alice Errol and Other Tales. In 1865 Sarah Mair founded the Ladies' Edinburgh Debating Society, which published a regular writing journal, The Attempt. Charlotte Carmichael had become a member by 1866 and published sundry pieces in The Attempt. In a meeting of the society in 1867 Mary Crudelius presented her initiative of creating classes for women at a university level under the auspices of the Edinburgh Ladies' Educational Association. Charlotte Carmichael was present at the meeting. She pledged her willingness to attend such classes and guaranteed another twelve interested persons. The first classes began in 1868, taught by Professor David Masson, Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh University, at a time when the University was not open to women and courses were given to them privately by the male Professors'. In 1876 Stopes went to Glasgow to help the movement for women's higher education in that city. The trip coincided with a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which she attended, beginning her long connection with the association. It was at the Glasgow meeting that she met Henry Stopes, who, despite his being eleven years the younger, she would marry three years later. After they were married on 3 June 1879, the Stopeses went on a honeymoon across Europe and the Near East, eventually visiting Egypt, before returning to Britain. Charlotte Stopes went to Edinburgh where her first daughter, Marie, was born in 1880. After reaching her husband in Colchester, his family home, they moved to London, where he had an active business. They settled in Upper Norwood on the southern outskirts of the city, where her second daughter, Winnie, was born in 1884. Henry, being very busy with business, left Charlotte alone in their new house, where she was isolated from the sorts of intellectual life she had been used to. Her response was to organize meetings and classes, including a reading group, a logic workshop and a group focused on issues relating to women's emancipation. As a Shakespearean scholar her recognition continued to increase and in 1912 she was elected as an honorary member of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1914 she became the founding member of a new Shakespeare Association which promoted Shakespearean scholarship through functions and lectures until 1922.