This discussion explores some of the ways in which historical narratives can emerge from gaps in the evidence and in our ways of thinking about the past, with reference to the writer, feminist activist and Shakespearean scholar, Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (1841–1929). A considerable body of manuscript and other archival material relating to the Stopes family is held in public hands. However, key items, including Charlotte Stopes's own correspondence with prominent people of her time, have been lost or destroyed. This article aims to address the tensions between private and public aspects of Stopes's life as a way of exploring ways in which the absence, as well as the presence, of evidence can influence historical accounts. As the discussion sets out to show with reference to Stopes, historical attention may be drawn to certain kinds of evidence in accordance with dominant cultural narratives, allowing these narratives to be repeatedly rehearsed across generations of scholarship. This process may then produce a discursive gap, a failure to recognize marginal or unfashionable contributions to public culture, which in turn produces distortions in the record of the past.