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Title: Mannin, Ethel Author: Albert Meltzer Date: 1977 Language: en Topics: Ethel Mannin, biography Source: Retrieved on 22nd September 2020 from https://libcom.org/history/articles/1900-1985-ethel-mannin Notes: This in an amalgamation of 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
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 (ed: he
probably means George Woodcock, who it would appear Meltzer doesn’t
think too highly of!). 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.
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 (wasnt 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 Mannins emotional approach to anarchism, but not since.
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.