Ethel Mannin’s autobiographies, including Confessions and Impressions (1930) and Privileged Spectator (1939), are listed in Burnett, Vincent and Mayall’s three-volume critical annotated bibliography, The Autobiography of the Working Class (1984, 1987, 1989) but not included (presumably because they are published works) in the Burnett Archive of Working-Class Autobiographies. According to the Penguin paperback edition of Confessions and Impressions that I am looking at here, the book had passed through its fiftieth impression in April 1936 before publication by Penguin in revised edition in January 1937 (my copy is actually from the fourth impression of the paperback published in February 1938). Burnett, Vincent and Mayall note ‘that the book caused a minor scandal when published because of the frankness of her confessions and impressions’ (1987: 204). They are underselling it. Mannin was already a bestselling professional author by the second part of the 1920s and her story of how she achieved this as a board-school educated child of a Civil Service letter-sorter in Clapham was a huge success. While her refreshing lack of sexual hypocrisy was no doubt partly responsible for this achievement, confirmation that a working-class woman could become a professional writer spoke to the rapid social change of the interwar years and the aspirations of many ordinary people to write, as documented by Christopher Hilliard in To Educate Our Talents (2006).
Mannin’s adventures in the USA, where she travelled as a star author, combine the zest of a flapper at loose in the roaring twenties with a wisecracking wit: ‘it is such a mistake to take a conscience with one on an Atlantic crossing’ (74); ‘In New York City there are no husbands; only married men’ (80). Yet she, herself, was already married with a daughter before she turned twenty and had spent five years combining childcare with writing full time in a small suburban semi before venturing on that first Atlantic crossing. The overall feeling of this short autobiography (only the first 118 pages of the volume – the second half is a series of pen portraits of people she knew – notably Douglas Goldring, Paul Robeson, George Lansbury, Ellen Wilkinson, Holbrook Jackson, Norman Haire, A. S. Neill, Radclyffe Hall, Arnold Bennet, Somerset Maugham and Bertrand Russell), is neither rags-to-riches nor celebrity journalism but an understated progressive politics (as implied by the second-half selection). Writing of her school years, Mannin notes
But that board-school had its shocks. A nurse came once a week and examined our hair for lice. The girls who were verminous had to be segregated and sat at benches together, shamed outcasts. They were generally known as “the dirty girls.” The teachers themselves used to refer to them as such. No, this is not back in the dark ages of history; it was in 1908. In 1914 when I left the school the expression was still in use. (36)
The sense is that Mannin is writing from a position of enlightenment. She advocates that intelligent men and women teachers should leave the orthodox education system and go ‘over to the ranks of radicals like A. S. Neill and Bertrand Russell’:
They are the pioneers of the new education; they educate by not educating; they know that all education is futile. Ultimately there will be no more schools just as there will be no more marriages … (34)
Mannin’s autobiography therefore serves to disseminate progressive ideas to a wide audience and suggests a cultural continuation of social concerns from the 1920s to the 1930s that was to become central to how people negotiated the social change of the period. As briefly suggested in my previous post (and to be further discussed in the future), Mannin’s own progression to a more overt socialist politics during the 1930s – as an ILP member and the author of Women and the Revolution (1938) – is not just reflected but also worked out in her (autobiogra)fiction. Yet even in the heightened political tensions of the late 1930s, Confessions and Impressions remained a significant intervention in British social life by reaching concerns not so prominently featured in the popular front writing of the time, as implied in the following passage from Mannin’s next and very different volume of autobiography, Privileged Spectator. Mannin was staying in a Sussex Inn while she worked on what would become her 1937 novel, Women Also Dream:
to the bewilderment of the chambermaid, who assumed I was typing out the manuscript of someone else’s [book], never dreaming she would ever set eyes on an author in the flesh. When as a result of her curiosity I had to tell her that I was actually composing the manuscript as I went along, and to reveal my identity to her, she was immeasurably shocked. It seems she had read my Confessions and never dreamed. . . . I thought the poor girl would never have done staring. But when she got used to the idea we became the best of friends and she told me all about her married life, its unhappiness, her separation from her husband, how she had been married at seventeen and ‘didn’t know a thing’, how she had read a sex book since, and some people say you shouldn’t read such books, but there it was, she had got hold of it, and being a married woman at the time it couldn’t do any harm, though on the whole she thought these books weren’t really ‘right’, not really decent. We talked about the catering trade and the long hours that prevailed in it, and called each other ‘dear’ and were sorry to part with each other. (Mannin 1939: 139)
This almost stream-of-consciousness intrusion into Mannin’s narrative suggests that the progressive desire to escape the dark ages was working at many different levels in the Britain of the late 1930s.
Further Reading:
Hilliard, Christopher. To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratisation of Writing in Britain, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Mannin. Ethel. Confessions and Impressions, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1937 [1930].
Mannin, Ethel. Privileged Spectator, London: Jarrolds, 1939.
One thought on “Ethel Mannin’s Confessions and Impressions (1930/1937)”