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Title: Ethel Mannin (1900–1985)
Author: Albert Meltzer
Date: 1977
Language: en
Topics: Ethel Mannin, biography
Source: Retrieved on 19th May 2021 from https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/mpg58h
Notes: These two pieces were both written by Albert Meltzer. The first appeared in the Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review (1977), the second in The Anarchists in London 1935–1955, 1976

Albert Meltzer

Ethel Mannin (1900–1985)

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. 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.

Alas, she has committed the major literary sin: her novels have been

successful, and the higher critics cannot possibly evaluate her.

Dig into the novels of Ethel Mannin and you will find anarchism, the

Spanish Revolution, Emma Goldman, women’s lib., the colonial struggle,

the Arab guerrillas, all dealt with: her factual works include Women and

the Revolution and many others.

At 75 she has announced she will write no more. The great quality in her

novels was a zest for life. She owed a lot to her father, an old-time

socialist who kept the faith. The drive for freedom, the resentment of

injustice, and also the occasional ideological muddle (one of her best

books was Christianity or Chaos?, an oddly titled book for an agnostic

talking about purely secular matters) were all very typical of her

British working class background. She was in her way a skilled

craftsman, her trade was with words. Now she has retired, her works, of

consummate craftsmanship if not great art, are there to be admired.

Thank you, Ethel Mannin.

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.

I would like to recall in connection with Ethel Mannin, once on a train

journey discussing anarchism with a Communist shop steward and his young

wife. He knew nothing of it beyond party line defamations (wasn’t it

Trotskyism?) — she, on the contrary, knew quite something of the

subject, and was quite proud to think that she, for once, could carry on

a political conversation while her husband was at a total loss. (She was

not unaware how maddened he was). He asked her, amazed, What do you know

of Alexander Berkman? When she asked if I had met him she smiled and

explained that she was not as dumb as he evidently thought she was. I

realised — as much from the occasional mistakes she made as the from the

general knowledge of anarchism she showed — that she was a reader of

Ethel Mannin, who had come to her political books via her novels, and

indeed, probably learned a lot from some of her better novels too. I

naturally did not give this away to the husband, who was probably the

better for the chastening experience. Before this I might have

criticised Ethel Mannin’s emotional approach to anarchism, but not

since.

Ethel Mannin’s works include Red Rose, Comrade, O Comrade!, Bread and

Roses, various travel books including South to Samarkand and 7 volumes

of autobiography.

She used to write for Pelican at the start of her writing career, and

during the thirties contributed to Spain and the World.