Ethel Mannin 1900-1984
Ethel Mannin was a popular British novelist, travel writer, political activist, socialist who was born in 28 Garfield Road off Lavender Hill. She was of Irish descent and had inherited her socialist values from her father Bob who was a postal worked. She is now one of the Notable Women of Lavender Hill. She was a prodigious author of over a 100 books!
Ethel bought Oak Cottage 27 Burghley Road Wimbledon in 1929 and lived there till 1974. I went to check it out on a hot day in July 2020 and took photos from the street but then knocked on the door. The Japanese man answered, I told him why I was there, he produced some of Ethel’s books and said his wife would probably be interested in speaking to me but she was having a bath. He took me to their Japanese style back garden where I waited and his wife Alison came and we had a long chat! She is Director of the Royal Asiatic Society. I will apply for a plaque for Oak Cottage rather than for the Garfield Road house.
This working class self-educated woman born in 1900 was a lifelong political maverick, was a pacifist, an anarchist, and an ardent supporter of the Palestinian cause was. She was twice married and had a sexual relationship with Yeats and Bertrand Russell who featured in Impressions as Portrait of a First Class Mind. These affairs were between husbands and this time and her views came back to haunt her later.
She was described in The Socialist Review as ‘a successful author, activist and fighter for sexual liberation, has truly been hidden from history. She moved in the same circles as George Orwell, CLR James and other radicals in the 1930s, yet few have heard of her today.’……. an opponent of censorship, a champion of sexual liberation and of progressive child-centred education. http://socialistreview.org.uk/428/ethel-mannin-hidden-history
I was amused that she was miffed at Isadora Duncan referring to herself as the ‘female Casanova of America’ stating that I have been called “a modern George Sand”(“but so much better looking, my dear”) but I have never gone about making a sort of slogan of it. She appears in most photos with a severe hairstyle with a middle parting.
Ethel Edith was the eldest of the three children of Robert Mannin, a postal worker and Edith Gray, a farmer’s daughter from Devon. Her father Bob worked in the Post Office. She wrote a piece about Lavender Hill on a Saturday night, when she was in a little wooden pushcart, in her first memoirs Confessions and Impressions written in 1930. This is the only book of hers that I have read so far.
She talked of the ‘flairs on the street stalls, red as fire against the night-dark sky…..The crowds were more dense too which was an added excitement… the yellow glare of lights from the shop fronts, the warm smell of the people pressed close together , the bunches of walllflowers stacked on barrows, the pungent smell of oranges and the great glowing blaze of their colour, the bunches of grapes, white and black suspended like Japanese lanterns from the awnings, the white nakedness of the scrubbed celery heads gleaming wantonly in the flicker and shadow, the rhythmic rows of shining apples And the black shawled gipsy-looking women who sold these things and their rough men-folk and brass earrings in their ears… infinitely romantic….clutching string bags costers shouting prices, a din of traffic… myself safe being pushed through it all like a dexterously manipulated ship on a dark sea, in my little chair on wheels.’
There was a lovely post office opposite the library on Lavender Hill which got demolished. Perhaps that is where Bob was a mail sorter. Her father was also a fan of John Burns MP and she writes about walking on Clapham Common with her Dad as a young girl and them meeting Burns with his son.
And coincidentally she also has a chapter on actors Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton – Portrait of a Strange Pair. She probably didn’t know that Elsa also grew up near Clapham Common in Leathwaite Road and was also aware of John Burns and seeing him when she walked along Clapham Common Northside on her way to school. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/06/09/elsa-lanchester-hollywood-actress-and-notable-woman-of-lavender-hill/
When I read it I realised that she lived off Lavender Hill and not in Clapham as is usually stated and discovered, with the help of Emma, from the Heritage Library, that the family lived at 28 Garfield Road. It is a landlorded house now with red painted bricks and pvc windows and door. I’m sure it would have looked more elegant from the outside when the Mannin’s lived there. She wrote about ‘mounting the steep stairs of the old tall house into the small room with green cloth on the table and the canary covered up for the night and the kitchen range shining …a room mysterious with the blue-grey dimness of the turned-down gas.’
Soon after she was six she was sent to a private school in a small house. ‘I was dreadfully unhappy and tormented here’ From there she went to a Board School, which was overcrowded, and the syllabus had little connection with real life she said. I suspect this could have been Wix’s Lane School. She failed to get a scholarship to secondary school. She began writing stories and the first of these appeared in the Lady’s Companion in 1910.
In 1915 she won a scholarship to attend a commercial school and she fell in love with one of her teachers who was a member of the Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society. After leaving school she found employment as a typist for the advertising agency, Charles F. Higham Ltd and soon he promoted her to the post of copywriter. ‘
‘At sixteen I was writing advertisements, running two house-organs – business magazines – and when I was seventeen was publishing my own stories, articles, verses, in a monthly magazine which Higham bought and left to me to produce.” Her employer was to have a great influence on her career.
She began a relationship with a New Zealand artist : “I was deeply religious until I was sixteen, and then the artist… who was my real education, put into my hands the essays of Robert Green Ingersoll and Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, together with a Rational Press Association Annual, and I became an agnostic’ He was a conscientious objector during the WWI and in 1917 he returned to New Zealand.
She became romantically involved with John Porteous who was the general manager at Highams. They married in 1919 and soon after gave birth to her only child Jean.With a young baby to look after, she worked from home writing advertisements and editing journals. Mannin was a supporter of progressive education and sent her daughter to Summerhill School.
In 1929 Ethel and John Porteous separated and she bought Oak Cottage 27 Burghley Road Wimbledon.I checked this house out on Zoopla, the estimated price was £4,157,000!! In a book by Lucy Pethridge on interiors she wrote of Oak Cottage. ‘Inside it was not in the least cottagey. It was a riot of shiny lacquered blue, black and orange with a Egyptian runners on the wall, a print of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on the fireplace and the cabinet gramophone painted in bright zigzags. Oak Cottage exemplified the new aesthetic of the twenties. ‘Modernity’ wrote Mannin ‘was cube shaped and jazz patterned’.
Paul Tanqueray photographed her. His work was often shown in The Tatler and The Sketch. This is Ethel in her back garden at Oak Cottage and reading to her daughter Jean.
The website Neglected Books has an appraisal of Ethel’ s memoirs which concluded that with such a prodigious output, it was bound to be uneven. She was lucky to have the connections she made with publishers and the competition today is so much greater to find a publisher. She knew that she would have no trouble getting her books published and so she kept writing them.
https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=3354 Confessions was one of her most successful and popular books, going into multiple printings and being reissued a few years later as an early Penguin paperback. Its success owed much to the novelty of Mannin’s scandalous confessions, such as falling in love with one of her female teachers, enduring the abuse of another (psychopathic) teacher who refused to let her pupils use the toilet and kept them hostage until they wet themselves and were duly punished, and having several affairs, including one with an unnamed man so distraught over their break-up that he committed suicide. Heady stuff for its time.
But, at the same time, Confessions and Impressions offers an early clue to the secret of Ethel Mannin’s success as a word producer and failure as a writer. After the war, Mannin seems to have latched onto a formula guaranteed to keep her production rate high.
Over the next decades, she would write and publish at a furious pace, producing 30 novels by 1952. She had set set for herself early on in her career of writing two books a year, one fiction and one nonfiction.
This website includes Ethel Mannin in a list of authors whose books won’t be pulped https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/latest-news/forgotten-writers-who-won-t-be-pulped-fiction-1-4048956
Motherhood brought forth an interest in various facets of education and child-rearing, subjects about which she developed strong opinions and dealt with in several books. Her politics and views on schooling were progressive, and the ideas of A.S. Neill, the radical advocate of child-centered education
In 1931 she published Common Sense and the Child, a book about the educational theories of A. S. Neill. She argued that “all outside compulsion is wrong… inner compulsion is the only value”. She also suggested that “there is no such thing as the naughty child… there are only happy children and unhappy children.” She produced a novel, Linda Shawn (1932), on the subject of progressive education. Love’s Winnowing (1932) was her first openly politically novel
All of her books are in one way or another manifestations of her sympathy for the underdog, particularly the working classes. The various crises of the 1930s only served to heighten her sense of social justice. During these years, she joined the Independent Labour Party, which advocated taking a strong position against the growing threat of Fascism. She traveled to the Soviet Union in 1936, a visit she recorded in South to Samarkand, and the sharply critical observations of the Stalinist regime included in the work made her very unpopular in British Marxist and pro-USSR circles.
During the Spanish Civil War she helped American anarchist veteran Emma Goldman organize meetings in London to create public support for Spain’s anarcho-syndicalist factions. The novel, which centered on the triangular relationship between Goldman, her lover Alexander Berkman, and Berkman’s inamorata Emmy Eckstein , remains an important source on Goldman’s life and personality according to her entry in Women’s Encylopedia. https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/mannin-ethel-1900-1984 She wrote The Blossoming Bough (1943), in which an Irishman goes to Paris and thence to the Spanish Civil War, remaining faithful to his actress-cousin Katherine O’Donal.
In 1938 she married the Quaker pacifist writer Reginald Reynolds. He was perhaps best known as a critic of British Imperialism in India, who collaborated with Gandhi for his 1937 work The White Sahibs in India. For many years he was also New Statesman’s weekly satirical poet.
He resigned from the Independent Labour Party (1939) over the issue of British policies toward the Arab population of British-occupied Palestine, and she soon followed. During the next decades, she would become deeply involved with issues relating to the rights of the Palestinian Arabs, eventually emerging as one of the most vocal and eloquent defenders of Palestinians at a time when most British intellectuals championed the Zionist-led cause of the Jewish population of Palestine.
Ending what she called “the bitter, dangerous 1930s” with a better understanding of politics, society and literature, she had far more respect for her working-class friends and acquaintances, whom she saw as “good comrades of the class struggle,” than for the “suede-shoed communists with Oxford accents and about as much knowledge of working class life and problems as they have of the word ‘Left.'”
In the years after 1945, Ethel traveled around the globe for material for new books. She first spent time in Ireland and writing of Connemara Journal (1947). A stay in war-ravaged occupied Germany resulted in German Journey (1948), while a number of other books were based on visits to Brittany, Egypt, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Morocco, and Sweden.
Although her trips were usually brief, her sharp powers of observation often resulted in considerable insights in her travel books. Some of these insights also found their way into her fiction, as was the case in her 1956 novel The Living Lotus. Set in rural upper Burma (now Myanmar), the book has been described as a realistic work with not only entertainment value but also information about the Burmese.
Her 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”
In the 1960s, she became greatly interested in the Middle East. A long trip through Iraq and Kuwait in 1963 produced A lance for the Arabs in 1963 and the novel, The Road to Beersheba which she saw as a pro-Palestinian counter to Leon Uris’ huge pro-Israeli best-seller, Exodus. She returned to Jordan in 1965, producing The Lovely Land (1965) (travelogue) and The Burning Bush (1965), also favoring the Palestinian cause.
Besides her Battersea connection I was also interested in her Irish sojourn in Connemara and how she came to be sometimes acclaimed as an Irish writer especially as she got included in the badge-of-honour of Irish banned books and authors. Ethel claimed she inherited her father’s fair hair and Celtic imagination as he knew ‘all the lore and legend of the little people’. Mannin is an old Irish name and claim direct descent from King Brian Boru. Melough Castle is a ruined Mannin stronghold in east Galway and Ethel chose to settle and buy a cottage near Clifden a few miles from Mannin Bay.
Ethel lived near Clifden in the late 1930s and early 1940s. My eldest sister Ida remembered our mother pointing out Ethel’s cottage on car trip. During those years she was also a regular visitor to Dublin, where she numbered Yeats, Maud Gonne and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington among her friends. Two of her most famous books are closely associated with the Clifden area: Connemara Journal (an account of her stay there);dedicated to Maude Gonne McBride and Late Have I Loved Thee (her best-selling novel, which is partly set there)was dedicated to her friend the late Isabel Foyle, of Foyle’s Hotel in Clifdenhttps://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/ethel-mannin-1.185991
She returned to Connemara, feeling ‘romantically and sentimentally in love with the country’, in Nov. 1945, when she bought the cottage, previously rented; spoke at public meetings against the Partition of Ireland – ‘the imperialist problem nearest home’ – and elected Chairman of West London Area of Anti-Partition Committee. She bought a 12-sailing boat called Kathleen in Connemara, June 1949.
Late Have I Loved Thee (1948) was popular in Ireland because it is about Francis Sable who converts to Catholicism and joins the Jesuits in Milltown, Ireland, after his much-loved sister Cathyn Sable dies in a climbing accident; based on the story of Fr. John Sullivan, S.J., son of the last Lord Lieutenant of Ireland a convert, the novel was was said to be responsible for many vocations, and was adopted by the Women Writers’ Club (Sec. Dr. Lorna Reynolds); Ethel and her husband dined there with Earl of Wicklow, Sean MacBride, Kate O’Brien, Mrs. Isabel Foyle – the dedicatee of the novel who had prompted it with information about O’Sullivan – and Elizabeth Rivers.
A reviewer on Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3529618-late-have-i-loved-thee wrote: This has been on my shelf for years. When I read that it was Pope Francis’ favorite book, I knew I had to read it asap. A wonderful and inspiring read. I love conversion stories as they remind me that God love is greater than any shackles of sin. Reminds me of Brideshead! and another A novel of conversion, written by a noncatholic anarchist. Loved it.
Ethel issued Every Man a Stranger (1949), a novel based on the life of William Joyce Lord Haw Haw, who was born In Galway, for which Rivers refused the dedication saying that the theme turned her ‘sideways with distaste’
She wrote an illustrated parody Comrade O Comrade – a forgotten satire of the British and Irish left set in the late 30s, which tells the story of a British communist’s quest to transform a Galway farmer Larry into a Marxist revolutionary. https://goodbyetwilight.wordpress.com/2018/10/11/comrade-o-comrade-a-forgotten-satire-of-the-british-and-irish-left/ but a reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald didn’t like it.https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/27901732/1007554
Her other Irish connection was her affair with WB Yeats in the thirties. Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats writes: ‘Ethel Mannin was a rationalist and skeptical, he mystical and credulous. Politics divided them too. She was left-wing, just short of being a Marxist, his leanings were firmly the other way. But that hardly mattered when, as a companion, she was brilliant, fun, and full of the salty talk that Yeats adored. She was not worried about his cultural baggage: “Yeats full of Burgundy and racy reminiscence was Yeats released from the Celtic Twilight and treading the antic hay with abundant zest.” When their relationship became actively sexual is not known. [Norman] Haire had enlisted Ethel specifically to reassure Yeats about the success of the Steinach operation, and she had … dress[ed] as seductively as possible.’ (Privileged Spectator, London 1939, p.81; Maddox, p.281.)
Mannin whom Yeats addressed as ‘Mother Goddess,’ telling her ‘You are doubly a woman, first because of yourself & secondly because of the Muses whereas I am but once a woman.’ from the book A foolish, Passionate Man: Margot Ruddock and Ethel Mannin by Joseph M Hasset.
Jonathan deBurca Butler wrote in the Irish Independent newspaper an article titled The Many Women of W B Yeats. Yeats had a Steinach operation, a type of vasectomy, which was said by its supporters to increase energy and sexual vigour in men. According to Yeats, the procedure worked and he claimed to go through what he called “a second puberty”. Shortly after the operation, Ethel Mannin, a 34-year-old writer and member of the World League for Sexual Reform, was called on to “test the operation’s efficacy”.
Roy Foster in an article Poetry of Women from Yeats: A Life; wrote: ” Affairs with people such as Bertrand Russell had left her with something of a reputation as an apostle of “free love”, which later came back to haunt her…. Crescendo, described as a “saga of sex”. A few years later her Women and the Revolution argued straightforwardly for free love, equal sexual rights and opportunities for men and women, instant divorce and abortion on demand. “https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-poetry-of-women-xn98xlwb0lp
She continued to live in her beloved home of Oak Cottage, Wimbledon, after the 1958 death of her husband. He died unexpectedly, on an Australian lecture tour. There are further incidents/people in her life like appearing in court as a character-witness for a robber, befriended by her husband and herself and visited in prison on previous occasions!
At the end of her writing career, when she was in her 70s, she moved to “Overhill”, Shaldon, Devonshire, in the 1960s – a house found for her by Jean to be near her. In 1976, she published her last novel, The Late Miss Guthrie. The next year, she published her final book, a last volume of autobiography, Sunset over Dartmoor: A Final Chapter of Autobiography (1977). In this work, she addressed her many loyal readers as old friends and demonstrated the charm that had kept them faithful to her even when in some instances her opinions were by no means palatable to every reader.
Virginia Nicholson in Among the Bohemians wrote: Ethel Mannin: ” didn’t resent the passing of youth, but she felt displaced in the post-War world of the 1950s… In old age her pleasures were correspondingly elderly – good wine, good books, and her roses. Her robust impatience with humbug remained vigorous however. She continued to travel, espoused Buddhism, and signed up to a variety of liberal causes. Passion, she felt, was for the young, but ‘the unending struggle against injustice and barbarism in the world’ was perennial.
Neglected Books thought that in her final memoir Sunset over Dartmoor that she did an imitation of a Tory old fogey: “We who were young in the Twenties are intensely aware of the Seventy’s scene because we have no part in it–nor want any.” and that it could have been the summing up of a remarkable career and life. Instead, it was the last lap of a writer who’d already run too long and was just going through the motions she’d drilled into her muscle memory through sheer repetition.
Ethel died in Devon on December 5, 1984 in Teignmouth Hospital after she had a fall.
Ethel was a woman with so many facets and phases to her life politically and as a writer. Her earlier life which helped inform her political views, early motherhood, her lifestyle and affairs in her thirties, her anarchist phase, her marriage to a pacifist Quaker, her socialism, Spanish civil war, the travel after the war and all the time churning out books and it seemed to have become a way of life for her. So she could switch between her novels and travel books with the latter inspiring the former, reflecting the politically changing world around her and revised her own attitudes and campaigning accordingly. She could write about her cat, children’s books, she could speak at meetings, join Reg in his work, writing magazine articles. She must have spent so much of her time at her typewriter in her study in Oak Cottage.
She has made an impact in many different fields as she aged and her interests changed which is why she is still of interest to younger people who are discovering her work and writing and blogging about her. From the PhD student discovering her parody Comrade O Comrade to Peter Faulkner writing about Ethel Mannin and William Morris for The Morris Society. http://www.morrissociety.org/JWMS/13.2Spring1999/SP99.13.2.Faulkner.pdf
There is the middle eastern scholar Ahmed Al Rawi writing his paper on the Post Colonial novels of Desmond Stewart (1924–81) and Ethel Mannin (1900–84) who are both unique among British fiction writers because they offered different portrayals of the post-colonial Arab world than what was mostly found in Western mainstream writings…. Mannin focused on the postcolonial era which followed the British occupation and was represented in the Palestinian national movements. and offered a more complex and diverse view of the Arab world that was far different from many other stereotypical fictional depictions.
The blog Inspiring older readers says: grab her books while you can and explore the world of one of literature’s great radicals. Ethel Mannin : novelist, travel writer and Socialist http://www.letterpressproject.co.uk/inspiring-older-readers/2016-08-03/ethel-mannin-novelist-travel-writer-and-socialist
The website Kate Sharpley Library on anarchy and anarchists have written about her as one of their own. Ethel Mannin the novelist in fact did a great deal of work for the anarchist movement, in particular during the Spanish struggle, and continued to give us support during the war…The great quality in her novels was a zest for life. She owed a lot to her father, an old-time socialist who kept the faith. https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/0zpcq4 as has Albert Meltzer https://libcom.org/library/on-ethel-mannin-albert-meltzer
The Neglected Books website in 2017 revised its view of her on reading No More Mimosa “After writing a fairly disparaging piece about Ethel Mannin’s six volumes of memoirs two years ago, I wouldn’t have counted on finding her work on my reading list again” https://neglectedbooks.com/?tag=ethel-mannin
When I am researching someone’s life or when I am writing and compiling a funeral tribute I find that I become quite intensely absorbed in these people’s lives. I also wonder if I would have liked them, if I would have got on with them or have been likely to have socialised with them. I think I would have been a bit intimidated by her and that she would be haughty. I think, she was inevitably somewhat shallow and misplaced in her allegiances. But, I would liked to have gossiped and nattered with over a glass of wine and I am so pleased to have found another notable women of Lavender Hill and Battersea making up three significant women authors of the 2Oth century who lived in Battersea close to Clapham Common.
Rosanne Rabinowitz wrote a short story The Shiftings for The Far Tower: Stories for WB Yeats from Swan River Press which is a musing from Ethel on Willy Yeats when she is in her 80s in her Devon rose garden and I was chuffed when she mentioned this blog as a summary for Ethel’s life and work.
Other works
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sheelanagigcomedienne
Jeanne Rathbone 
[…] As part of series on notable women of Lavender Hill in Battersea, this blog post provides a good summary of Ethel’s life and […]
Hi, your readers might also be interested to hear that Dublin-based Swan River Press has brought out a new edition Ethel’s novel Lucifer and the Child.
http://swanriverpress.ie/title_lucifer.html