Mannin's father, Robert Mannin (d. 1948) was a member of the Socialist League who passed his left-wing beliefs on to his daughter.[2] Mannin later stated that: "His socialism went a great deal deeper than any politics or party policy; it was the authentic socialism of the Early Christians, the true communism of 'all things in common' utterly-and tragically-remote from Stalinism".[2] When at boarding school, following the outbreak of World War I, Mannin was asked to write an essay on "Patriotism". Hoping to impress her favourite teacher (a Communist sympathiser) Mannin's essay was an advocacy of anti-patriotic and anti-monarchist ideas. For writing the essay, Mannin's headmistress scolded her and made her kneel in the school hall all morning. Mannin often mentioned this incident in her autobiographies as shaping her later politics.[3] Her writing career began in copy-writing and journalism. She became a prolific author, and also politically and socially concerned.[3] Mannin's memoir of the 1920s, Confessions and Impressions sold widely and was one of the first Penguinpaperbacks.[4]
Mannin's 1944 book Bread and Roses: A Utopian Survey and Blue-Print has been described by historian Robert Graham as setting forth "an ecological vision in opposition to the prevailing and destructive industrial organization of society".[11]
In 1954, Mannin was one of several signatories to a letter protesting against mass executions of Kenyans by the colonial government who had been "charged with offences less than murder".[12]
In her seventies, Mannin still described herself as an anti-monarchist "Republican" and a "Tolstoyan anarchist".[3]
She married twice: in 1919, a short-lived relationship from which she gained one daughter, Jean Porteous, a conscientious objector in WW2, for whom she gave evidence at a Tribunal;[13] and in 1938 to Reginald Reynolds, a Quaker and go-between in India between Mahatma Gandhi and the British authorities. In 1934–35 she was in an intense but problematic intellectual, emotional and physical relationship with W. B. Yeats, who was on the rebound from Margot Ruddock and about to fall for Dorothy Wellesley (a detailed account is in R. F. Foster's life of Yeats, concluding mainly that her emotional engagement was much less than his).[6] She also had a well-publicised affair with Bertrand Russell.
Worksedit
Autobiographiesedit
Confessions and Impressions (1930)
Privileged Spectator (1939)
Connemara Journal (1947)
Brief Voices (1959)
Young in the Twenties: A Chapter of Autobiography (1971)
Sunset over Dartmoor: A Final Chapter of Autobiography (1977)
Aspects of Egypt: Some Travels in the United Arab Republic (1964)
Rebels' Ride. A Consideration of the Revolt of the Individual (1964)
Report from Iraq (1964)
Lovely Land: The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (1965)
The Burning Bush (1965)
Loneliness: A Study of the Human Condition (1966)
The Night and Its Homing (1966)
The Lady and the Mystic (1967)
An American Journey (1967)
Bitter Babylon (1968)
England for a Change (1968)
The Saga of Sammy-Cat (1969)
Practitioners of Love. Some Aspects of the Human Phenomenon (1969)
The Midnight Street (1969)
England at Large (1970)
Free Pass to Nowhere (1970)
My Cat Sammy (1971)
England My Adventure (1972)
The Curious Adventure of Major Fosdick (1972)
Mission to Beirut (1973)
Stories from My Life (1973)
An Italian Journey (1974)
Kildoon (1974)
The Late Miss Guthrie (1976)
Short storiesedit
’’The Unremembered Years’’. John Bull, 28 December 1929
Referencesedit
^"Ethel Mannin - Gilbert Turner Papers, 1922-1981". John J. Burns Library, Boston College. hdl:2345/2790. Retrieved 19 October 2012.
^ abEthel Mannin, This was a man: some memories of Robert Mannin. London, Jarrolds 1952. (pp. 24–25)
^ abcdeAndy Croft, "Ethel Mannin: The Red Rose of Love and the Red Flower of Liberty" in Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai, (ed.),Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals : British Women Writers, 1889-1939.Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1993. ISBN 0807820873 (p. 205-225).
^"Writer, Pacifist Mannin Dies". The Montreal Gazette, 10 December 1984.
^ abcTwentieth century authors, a biographical dictionary of modern literature, edited by Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft; (Third Edition). New York, The H.W. Wilson Company, 1950 (pp. 905–6)
^ abRoy Foster, W. B. Yeats - A Life, II: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939. Oxford, 2003,ISBN 0-19-818465-4 (pp. 504, 510–512).
^Susan Dabney Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain. Princeton University Press, 2009 ISBN 069114186X, (pp. 93–4).
^Angela Jackson, British women and the Spanish Civil War. London ; New York : Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0415277973 (p.250)
^Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914-1945: the defining of a faith . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. ISBN 0198218826 (p. 229)
^Wyndham, Diana; Kirby, Michael. Foreword- (2012), Norman Haire and the study of sex, Sydney University Press, ISBN 978-1-74332-006-8, p. 415 quoting Confessions and Impressions (1930), pp. 191, 194.
^Robert Graham, Anarchism Volume Two: The Anarchist Current (1939-2006). Black Rose Books, 2009 ISBN 1551643103, (pp. 72–5).