Ethel Mannin

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 Penguin paperbacks.^[4]

She initially supported the Labour Party but became disillusioned in the 1930s. Initially sympathetic to the Soviet Union, a 1936 visit there left her disillusioned with Stalinism, which she described in her book South to Samarkand.^[5] According to R. F. Foster^[6] "She was a member of the Independent Labour Party, and her ideology in the 1930s tended to anarcho-syndicalism rather than hardline Communism, but she was emphatically and vociferously left-wing". She came to support anarchism, and wrote about the Russian-born, American anarchist Emma Goldman, a colleague in the Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista at the time of the Spanish Civil War.^[3] Mannin was actively involved in anti-imperialist activity on behalf of African nations during the 1930s, and befriended George Padmore, C. L. R. James and Chris Braithwaite who were leading figures involved in these movements.^[7] Mannin was actively involved in anti-fascist movements, including the Women's World Committee Against War and Fascism.^[3][8] Mannin supported the military actions of the Spanish Republic but opposed the Second World War.^[9]

Mannin listed Bart de Ligt and A. S. Neill as thinkers who influenced her ideas.^[5] She described W. Somerset Maugham and Aldous Huxley as the writers she most admired, called Norman Haire the "one completely rational person she had ever met"^[10] and stated her "opposition to capital punishment, orthodox education and blood sports".^[5]

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 historian R. F. Foster's biography of Yeats, concluding mainly that her emotional engagement was much less than his).^[6] She also had a well-publicised affair with Bertrand Russell.^{[citation needed]}

Following a fall at her Shaldon home in July 1984, Mannin died from a combination of heart failure and pneumonia at Teignmouth Hospital on 5 December of that same year.^[15]