She adapted the short story "Guests of the Nation" for a film directed by Denis Johnston.

[5] She worked as a film critic and co-founded the Gate Theatre arts magazine Motley in 1932.

There she later met and married lawyer Mark De Wolfe Howe, who had clerked for Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

[6] After World War II, Mark De Wolfe Howe became part of the faculty at Harvard Law School, his alma mater, and the official biographer of Justice Holmes.

In the summer of 1936, Mary Manning had a brief affair with Samuel Beckett, which led to a rumour that he was the biological father of her eldest daughter, Susan.

[10] From 1914 to 1926, Ireland had numerous new films being produced, largely in the genres of historical melodramas and romantic comedies.

There's minimal information on how Manning contributed to the second wave, but she was said to have a role in producing five of the six films released during that period.

Prior to her career as a writer and filmmaker, Mary Manning worked as a film critic throughout the 1920s and '30s.

She was known to disapprove of Hollywood's "unimaginable stories and its stereotypical portrayal of Ireland and the Irish".

In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds.