11 Facts About Ethel Mannin

Ethel Edith Mannin was a popular British novelist and travel writer, political activist and socialist.

For writing the essay, Ethel Mannin's headmistress scolded her and made her kneel in the school hall all morning.

Ethel Mannin often mentioned this incident in her autobiographies as shaping her later politics.

Ethel Mannin became a prolific author, and politically and socially concerned.

Ethel Mannin initially supported the Labour Party but became disillusioned in the 1930s.

Ethel Mannin 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.

Ethel Mannin was actively involved in anti-fascist movements, including the Women's World Committee Against War and Fascism.

Ethel Mannin supported the military actions of the Spanish Republic, but opposed the Second World War.

Ethel Mannin 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".

In 1954, Ethel 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".

Ethel Mannin 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; and in 1938 to Reginald Reynolds, a Quaker and go-between in India between Mahatma Gandhi and the British authorities.