Ethel Mannin was nothing if not prolific: she published 102 books, including novels, collections of short stories, travel books, polemical essays on social and political issues, biographies, children's stories, and books on education. She was an independent, exceptionally honest woman whose life and work reflect the changing intellectual and social fashions of the 1930s and the following decades. Several of her many novels remain readable for their forward-looking discussions of topics such as the problems of marriage, sexual relationships in general, and feminism.

Ethel Edith Mannin was born on 11 October 1900 in the London suburb of Clapham to Robert Mannin, a postal worker, and Edith Gray Mannin. She wrote in her first autobiography, Confessions and Impressions (1930), that she had inherited her Irish father's imagination and the practicality of her country-born mother. At six she was enrolled in a small, local private school; two years later she transferred to a boarding...