Ethel Mannin

The following originally appeared in the Autumn 2025 issue of Black Flag Review.

'There was an English poet called William Morris who said that the less people were governed the better. He called himself a socialist and he said anarchism was impossible but in his ideas about government he was an Anarchist, all the same.…No one seems to think much about him nowadays - hardly anyone reads him and his socialism is considered old-fashioned. He hadn't much use for politics. He wrote a book called News from Nowhere, about an imaginary community who lived according to the laws of common consent, and had all things in common. They turned the Houses of Parliament into a dung-market, and their children didn't go to school, being too busy learning to waste their time there!' – Ethel Mannin, Comrade, O Comrade (1945)

The comment that “No one seems to think much about him nowadays - hardly anyone reads him” could be equally applied to Ethel Mannin. As Peter Faulkner writes in his Ethel Mannin and William Morris: “in view of the vitality and political idealism that seems to pervade much of her writing, it is a pity that most of her books are now buried in the stacks of our public libraries. I hope that they will come back into the limelight of fashion.” Ethel wrote a hundred books and none of them are currently in print. The publishing house Virago, who have published works by women authors since 1973, have never deigned to publish any of her books, and yet she is a better writer than some on the Virago list. Second wave feminism seems to have ignored her, despite her books like Women and Revolution and her own emancipated life. Neither have academics given her much credit, most studies of British women writers totally ignoring her, with the rare exception of Andy Croft’s “Ethel Mannin: The Red Rose of Love and the Red Flower of Liberty”.

Ethel Edith Mannin was born in London on October 6th, 1900, in Lavender Hill, London. She was of Irish descent. Her father Bob, a postal worker, had been a member of the Socialist League. Her mother, Edith Gray, was a daughter of a Devon farmer. Ethel described her father’s politics as ‘the true communism of 'all things in common' utterly-and tragically-remote from Stalinism...' Before becoming a postal sorter at the Mount Pleasant office, Bob had worked as a Covent Garden porter, and as a teenager had joined the Socialist League. He attended meetings at William Morris’s house at Hammersmith and was present on the plinth at Trafalgar Square when the police baton charged a demonstration in 1887, an event which became known as Bloody Sunday.
Ethel showed an aptitude for writing at an early age, and a story of hers was published in a magazine when she was only ten. Whilst at school, she wrote an essay attacking patriotism and the monarchy, which got her into trouble.

At the age of fifteen, she won a scholarship to attend a commercial school. There, she developed a crush on a woman teacher who was a member of the Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society.

She got a job with an advertising agency and then was promoted to copywriter. She developed a relationship with a New Zealand artist that she identified only as J.S. in her 1930 memoirs Confessions and Impressions, a convinced antimilitarist who eventually returned to his homeland in 1917 to avoid being conscripted. Her introduced her to a whole range of radical books, including works by William Morris and Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, to the Industrial Workers of the World and to vegetarianism and atheism. Up to then Ethel had been deeply religious and she now became an atheist, as well as becoming a vegetarian.

Ethel Mannin’s writing abilities allowed her to start publishing novels from the age of 23. She did this to pay the rent. As Albert Meltzer was to remark, “She was in her way a skilled craftsman, her trade was with words…her works, of consummate craftsmanship if not great art, are there to be admired.” Her early works were popular novels, and it was not until the Thirties that her books became openly political. Nevertheless, there was always sympathy in her early works for her own class and the situation of women.

In 1931 she published Common Sense and the Child, a book on progressive education and on A.S. Neill’s educational theories and she sent her only child, Jean, to Neill’s Summerhill school. She followed this up the following year with a novel, Linda Shawn, which had progressive education as a subject. The same year she brought out her first openly political novelette, Love’s Winnowing. It delineates the life of a working class woman, striving to fight against both class oppression and the subjection of women.

Mannin started frequenting meetings of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and finally joined it in 1933. She visited the Soviet Union in 1936, and quickly realised that this was not the ideal vision of communism that was being portrayed by the Communist Party. She rendered an account of her visit there in the book South to Samarkand. This made her highly unpopular in much of the left.
With the outbreak of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, she became very active with the ILP in organising meetings for solidarity and fund raising for the POUM, (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), working closely with anarchists. She came in contact with the American anarchist Emma Goldman, in Britain to fundraise for the CNT-FAI and she chaired a meeting setting up the CNT-FAI London Bureau, speaking alongside Goldman and the Irish anarchist Jack White. She continued to chair solidarity meetings alongside Goldman. She started to contribute articles to the anarchist paper Spain and the World, edited by Vernon Richards.

Mannin began to move towards an anarchist position. Her 1937 book Women and Revolution investigates figures such as the Communard and anarchist revolutionary Louise Michel. Whilst praising the Spanish anarchist women’s organisation Mujeres Libres (Free Women). In this book she stated that “The women of today must either ally themselves with freedom and life, or with oppression and death; either work for a brave new world, or surrender themselves, and their children, to the doomed old world.” Women must awaken “to the meaning of social revolution, and how it can serve her and her children…” and to “the realisation that revolution is not exclusively man’s business, no mere affair of politics, but her business…an affair of life itself – a choice between life and death.”

Around this time Ethel began a relationship with the Quaker pacifist Reginald Reynolds, who took an active part in anti-imperialist work around India and Palestine. Reynolds also became involved in anarchist activity. He resigned from the ILP in 1938, because it failed to take a critical attitude towards Zionism. Ethel Mannin resigned from the ILP the following year because of the ILP’s failure to thoroughly condemn Stalinism.

She took an intransigent antimilitarist line during the Second World War. In 1941 she produced a novel, Red Rose, which fictionalised the life of Emma Goldman, in which she was not averse to criticising Goldman’s cantankerousness and sometimes obnoxious behaviour. In 1944 she published a fine account of utopian visions of the future, Bread and Roses: A Utopian Survey and Blue-Print. I remember being lent this inspiring and thought-provoking book by another worker at the industrial laundry in Hove I was working at in the early 1970s. That year also she brought out No More Mimosa, a collection of 31 short stories which addressed itself to the Spanish Revolution, and dealt with anarchist figures like Goldman and Ralph Barr. It was dedicated to the Spanish anarchist Delso de Miguel.

In 1945, Mannin produced Comrade O Comrade, or, Low-Down on the Left, a fictionalised, witty, and satirical commentary on the British left, a book portraying high principles and multiple clay feet. Mannin does not spare the withering sarcasm in her accounts of the Communist Party, ILP and anarchist meetings, her Irish hero Larry Harrigan attends. In that year she was one of the few writers to support the War Commentary editors, arrested for anti-war activity on 22nd February, and she served as Secretary of the Freedom Press Defence Committee. In the years after the war Mannin and her husband Reg Reynolds were heavily involved in focussing on Palestine. They both insisted that opposition to the State of Israel and Zionism was not antisemitic, long before the controversies of today. Ethel wrote in her work A Lance for the Arabs (1963) that “It cannot be too strongly insisted that being anti-Zionist and antiIsrael is not being anti-Jewish” and that “by no means are all Jews pro-Zionist”.

In later life Ethel Mannin described herself as a Tolstoyan anarchist. In 1973 she wrote that “I have been a socialist all my adult life, from the age of 15, and now, at close of play, in the seventies, am more than ever convinced of the necessity for social revolution.” She died on 5th November, 1984.

Stuart Christie, often a harsh critic of other personalities on the anarchist scene, lumps her in with Reg Reynolds, Herbert Read, George Woodcock and Vernon Richards, as having a deleterious effect on the movement, collectively describing them as a “coterie of Tolstoyan and Gandhi influenced middle-class pacifists and academics” who rejected class struggle. His Black Flag associate Albert Meltzer would have agreed with this to an extent, but was generous enough to write: “Ask who is the writer who has contributed most in the English language to the spread of libertarian ideas and you will get some peculiar answers, probably one of them some obscure Canadian professor whom nobody reads except as prescribed in the university curriculum (a snide reference to George Woodcock). You might well get the same answer from Ethel Mannin, but for my money it is she who deserves the maximum credit, and seems to have received none that I know of. She was writing on sex and women’s liberation fifty years ago and has introduced anarchist ideas in numerous works of fact and fiction… “, writing elsewhere “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…”
Nick Heath