Ronald Mansbridge

Who was Ronald Mansbridge?

Ronald Mansbridge was a publisher, author and wit. He served for forty years as US representative for Cambridge University Press. He had also served briefly as Acting Director of MIT University Press and, for two years, as a Managing Director of the UK office of Yale University Press.

Frederick Ronald Mansbridge was born in Sanderstead, Surrey, England, the fourth child of George Frederick Mansbridge, inventor of the Mansbridge electrical condenser, and Florence Quye Mansbridge. He traced his ancestry back to the Mansbridges whose land is shown on medieval maps of Hampshire as the Mansbridge Hundred.

He was educated at Malvern College and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He came to the United States in 1928 and for two years taught in the English Department at Barnard College, working also at Oxford University Press. In 1930 he joined Cambridge University Press as its representative with the Macmillan Company in New York City.

On 10 April 1931, he married Georgia St Clair Mullan, daughter of George V. Mullan, Justice of the New York state supreme court, and Helen St Clair Mullan. He and Georgia had two children: Jane Mansbridge, born 19 November 1939, now Adams Professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and Bruce Mansbridge, PhD, born 20 April 1945, now Director of the Austin Center for the Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in Austin, Texas. He had two grandchildren: Nathaniel Mansbridge Jencks, of New York City, and Travis Marshall Mansbridge, of Austin. The Mansbridges moved from New York City to Weston, Connecticut, in 1947. In 1990, two years after the death of his first wife, Mansbridge married Janet Dunning Van Duyn, author of books on the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians, who died in 2003.