Ethel Edith Mannin (6 October 1900[1] – 5 December 1984) was a popular British novelist and travel writer, political activist and socialist.
She 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.
[5] She 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"[10] and stated her "opposition to capital punishment, orthodox education and blood sports".
[5] In 1943 she wrote the introduction to Dame Kathleen Lonsdale's Some account of life in Holloway prison for women, an influential report written for and published by the Prison Medical Reform Council[11] Mannin's 1944 book Bread and Roses: A Utopian Survey and Blue-Print has been described by historian Robert Graham as setting forth "an ecological vision in opposition to the prevailing and destructive industrial organization of society".
[3] She 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;[14] and in 1938 to Reginald Reynolds, a Quaker and go-between in India between Mahatma Gandhi and the British authorities.