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]
In 1943 she wrote the introduction to Dame Kathleen Lonsdale's Some account of life in Holloway prison for women, an influential report written for and published by the Prison Medical Reform Council[11]
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".[12]
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".[13]
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;[14] 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.
Works
Autobiographies
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)
^ 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. ISBN0807820873 (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,ISBN0-19-818465-4 (pp. 504, 510–512).
^Susan Dabney Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain. Princeton University Press, 2009 ISBN069114186X, (pp. 93–4).
^Angela Jackson, British women and the Spanish Civil War. London; New York : Routledge, 2002. ISBN0415277973 (p.250)
^Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914-1945: the defining of a faith . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. ISBN0198218826 (p. 229)
^Wyndham, Diana; Kirby, Michael. Foreword- (2012), Norman Haire and the study of sex, Sydney University Press, ISBN978-1-74332-006-8, p. 415 quoting Confessions and Impressions (1930), pp. 191, 194.
^Lonsdale, Kathleen (1943). Some account of life in Holloway prison for women. Chislehurst, Kent: Prison Medical Reform Council.
^Robert Graham, Anarchism Volume Two: The Anarchist Current (1939-2006). Black Rose Books, 2009 ISBN1551643103, (pp. 72–5).
