Life
1900-1984; b. 6 Oct. London, ed. local council schools until aged 15;
began prolific career at 19 writing for the women’s page; more than
100 books and 50 novels; first novels, written in her 20s and 30s, examine
lives of working-class women; focused on anarchism and pacifism in the
1940s, notably in Red Rose (1941), on Emma Goldman’s life;
lived for a time in Connemara; described herself as ‘an emancipated,
rebellious, and Angry Young Woman’; close friendship with W. B. Yeats in London, and exchanged letters from their meeting
in 1934, being a recipient of a copy of his epitaph (‘Cast a cold
eye […]’), with an explanation connecting it to Rilke; her novel
Late have I Loved Thee (1948) responsible for many vocations to
the Catholic Church, though written without personal belief; also wrote
on the Arab cause; d. 5 Dec. IF2 KUN OCIL DIL2
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Works
Novels, Martha (London: Leonard Parsons 1923; rev. ed.,
Jarrolds 1929); Hunger of the Sea (London: Jarrolds 1924); Pilgrims
(London: Jarrolds [1927]); Green Willows (London: Jarrolds [1928]);
Crescendo (London: Jarrolds [1929]); with other novellas by Warwick
Deeping and Gilbert Frankau, Forbidden Music (London: Readers’
Library [1929]); Children of the Earth (London: Jarrolds [1930]),
(xii), 13-288pp.; Ragged Banners (London: Jarrolds [1931]); All
Experience (London: Jarrolds 1932); Love’s Winnowing (London:
Wright & Brown [1932]); Venetian Blinds (London: Jarrolds 1933);
Men are Unwise (London: Jarrolds 1934); Cactus (London:
Jarrolds 1935; rev. edn. [1944]); The Pure Flame (London: Jarrolds
1936); Women also Dream (London: Jarrolds 1937); Darkness My
Bride (London: Jarrolds [1938]); Julie (London: Jarrolds [1940]);
Red Rose (London: Jarrolds [1941]) [based on life of Emma Goldman];
Rolling in the Dew (London: Jarrolds [1940]); Captain Moonlight
(London: Jarrolds [1942]); Castles in the Street (London: Letchworth
[1942]); The Blossoming Bough (London: Jarrolds [1943]( [err. Blooming,
DIL]; No More Mimosa (London: Jarrolds [1943]; Bread and Roses
(London: Macdonald [1944]); Proud Heaven (London: Jarrolds [1944]);
Lucifer and the Child (London: Jarrolds 194); The Dark Forest
(London: Jarrolds 1946); Sounding Brass (London: Jarrolds [1947];
rep. London: Hutchinson 1972); Late Have I Loved Thee (London:
Jarrolds [1948]) [var. 1947, IF2]; Every Man a Stranger (London:
Jarrolds [1949]); At Sundown, the Tiger (London: Jarrolds 1951);
The Fields at Evening (London: Jarrolds 1952); Love Under Another
Name (London: Jarrolds 1953); So Tiberius ... (London: Jarrolds 1954);
The Living Lotus (London: Jarrolds 1956), (x), 7-320pp.; Pity
the Innocent (London: Jarrolds 1957; rep. London: Hutchinson 1975);
Fragrance of Hyacinths (London: Jarrolds 1958); Ann and Peter
in Sweden (London: Frederick Muller [1959]); The Blue-Eyed Boy
(London: Jarrolds 1959); Sabsishisa (London: Hutchinson 1961);
Ann and Peter in Austria (London: Frederick Muller 1962); Curfew
at Dawn (London: Hutchinson 1962); With Will Adams Through Japan
(London: Frederick Muller 1962); Bavarian Story (London: Arrow
Books 1964); The Burning Bush (London: Hutchinson 1965);
Bitter Babylon (London: Hutchinson 1968); The Midnight Street
(London: Hutchinson 1969); Practitioners of Love (London: Hutchinson
1969); The Saga of Sammy-cat (London: Joseph 1971); The Curious
Adventures of Major Fosdick (London: Hutchinson 1972); England
My Adventure (London: Hutchinson 1972); Mission to Beirut (London:
Hutchinson 1973); Stories from My Life (London: Hutchinson 1973);
Kildoon (London: Hutchinson 1974); The Late Miss Guthrie
(London: Hutchinson 1976); Sunset over Dartmoor (London: Hutchinson
1977) [genre of some unidentified].
Short fiction, Bruised Wings and Other Stories (London: Wright & Brown [1931]); Green Figs (London: Jarrolds [1931]); The Tinsel Eden and Other Stories (London: Wright & Brown [1931]); Dryad (London: Jarrolds 1933); The Falconer’s Voice (London: Jarrolds 1935); Selected Stories (Dublin: Maurice Fridberg 1946); The Wild Swans and Other Tales based on the Ancient Irish (London: Jarrolds 1952).
Autobiographies, Confessions and Impressions (London: Jarrolds [1930]); Privileged Spectator (London: Jarrolds 1939; rev. edn. [1948]); Connemara Journal (London: Westhouse 1947) [ded. Maud Gonne McBride; ill by Elizabeth Rivers]; Brief Voices (London: Hutchinson 1959); Young in the Twenties (London: Hutchinson 1971) [poss. two more].
Travel, Forever Wandering (London: Jarrolds 1934; South to Samarkand (London: Jarrolds 1936); German Journey (London: Jarrolds [1948]); Jungle Journey (London: Jarrolds [1950]); Moroccan Music (London: Jarrolds 1951); Land of the Crested Lion (London: Jarrolds 1955); The Country of the Sea (London: Jarrolds 1957); Sabishisa (London: Hutchinson 1961), (xii), 13-284pp.; A Lance for the Arabs (London: Hutchinson 1963); The Road to Beersheba (London: Hutchinson 1963); Aspects of Egypt (London: Hutchinson 1964); Rebel’s Ride (London: Hutchinson 1964); The Lovely Land (London: Hutchinson 1965); An American Journey (London: Hutchinson 1967); An Italian Journey (London: Hutchinson 1975).
Miscellaneous, Commonsense and the Child (London: Jarrolds [1931]; Commonsense and the Adolescent (London: Jarrolds 1937); Women and the Revolution (London: Secker & Warburg 1938); Christianity – or Chaos? (London: Jarrolds [1940]); Commonsense and the Morality (London: Jarrolds [1942]; Comrade, O Comrade, or Low-Down on the Left (London: Jarrolds [1947]); Two Studies in Integrity, Gerald Griffin and the Rev. Francis Mahony [The Catholic Book Club] (London: Jarrolds 1954); Loneliness, A Study of the Human Condition (London: Hutchinson 1966).
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Notes
Frank Tuohy, Yeats (London: Macmillan 1976), sought to make
Yeats recommend Ossietski, a German political prisoner, for Nobel Award
in 1936 (p.214); Yeats wrote to her, ‘I hate more than you do, for
my hatred can have no expression in action. I am a forerunner of that
horde that will some day come down from the mountains.’ (p.215);
she twitted him for writing anti-English poems and drawing an English
pension (p.216).
A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: A New Biography (London: Macmillan 1988), writes: ‘In late December [Yeats’s] friendship with Ethel Mannin began in London; the letters he wrote to here are less interesting tha those to Margaret Rudduck as they tend to deal with his health or arrangements for meetings rather than with literary matters. He liked to entertain in the Ivy Restaurant and introduce Ethel Mannin – as he had Margot Ruddock – to the Dulacs and to Norman Haire [the author of Rejuvenation, 1924] (p.314).
Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats (NY: HarperCollins 1999), 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, and had recently returned starry-eyeed from the Soviet Union; 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 Brugundy and racy reminiscence was Yeats released from the Celtic Twilight and treading the antic hay with abundant zest." / When their relationshp 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.)
Desmond Clarke, Ireland in Fiction [Pt II] (Cork: Royal Carbery
1985), lists The Blossoming [sic] Bough (London: Jarrolds
1943) [takes an Irishman to Paris, and thence to the Spanish Civil War,
finally faithful to his Cathleen ni Houlihan, his actress and his cousin
Katherine O’Donal]; Late Have I Loved Thee (London: Jarrolds
1947), 350pp. [when Cathyn Sable dies in a climbing accident, her deeply
attached brother Francis becomes a Catholic and joins the Jesuits in Milltown,
Ireland; ‘a vivid and exacting picture of a man’s struggle to
sanctity’, acc. Clarke]; ; Pity for the Innocent (London:
Jarrolds 1967); The Wild Swans and Other Tales based on the
Ancient Irish (London: Jarrolds 1952), 158pp. [versions of ‘Children
of Lir’; ‘Wooing of Etain’; ‘Diarmid and Grainne’]; Pity for the Innocent (1957) [Terence Brilling’s mother kills
her young loved and is executed; as he grows up, he learns the truth and
suffers accordingly - against capital punishment]
W. B. Yeats, There is a passing reference to Mannin in Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948), concerning the new friendships that Yeats sought out in the 1930s, among them ‘Ethel Mannin, whose naturalness he had always striven for [...]’ (, p.279).
Mannin stated in an autobiographical writing that Late Have I Loved Thee, a work responsible for many vocations, was ‘written without any belief in that [i.e., Roman Catholic] church' [q. source].
Flann O’Brien [O’Nolan] wrote to her with a copy of At-Swim, seeking support and encouragement. Cronin writes, ‘.. best-selling popular novelist of the day ... Ethel Mannin was an expert sentimental and popular author who was probably a judge of public acceptability but little else. (See Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter, 1989, p.103.)
Francis Stuart, For details of her involvement in his post-war rehabilitation see Geoffrey Elborn, Francis Stuart: A Life (1990).
Eggeley Books (Cat. 44) lists Sabishisa (London: Hutchinson 1961), [xii], 13-284pp., the story of a Japanese family.
Belfast Central Public Library holds Connemara Journal (1947); Two Studies in Integrity (1954); Wild Swans (1952).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)