Ethel Mannin

Who was Ethel Mannin?

Ethel Edith Mannin was a popular British novelist and travel writer. She was born in London into a family with an Irish background.

Her writing career began in copy-writing and journalism. She became a prolific author, and also politically and socially concerned. She supported the Labour Party but became disillusioned in the 1930s. A visit in 1936 to the USSR left her unfavourable to communism. According to R. F. Foster '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. Mannin was actively involved in anti-imperialist activity on behalf of African nations during the 1930s, and befriended George Padmore who was also involved in these movements.

Mannin listed Bart de Ligt and A. S. Neill as thinkers who influenced her ideas. 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' and stated her "opposition to capital punishment, orthodox education and blood sports".