Ethel Mannin and D.H. Lawrence

[John Simkin]

In the first volume of her autobiography, Confessions and Impressions (1930), the 29 year old Ethel Mannin praised D.H. Lawrence banned book, Lady Chatterley's Lover, as "one of the truest and most beautiful and moving books the age has produced, there will be no more taking truth's name in vain, for truth will no longer be regarded as an indecency, and men and women will live and work and love and beget each other in the sun and wind and rain, cleanly and decently and simply as the animals do... who do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, nor make one sick discussing their duty to God, nor are demented with the mania of owning things."

However, in her book, Young in the Twenties, published when she was aged 71, Mannin described Lady Chatterley's Lover as "a very silly book". I agree that read today, Lady Chatterley's Lover is a very silly book. However, in the context of the 1920s, I believe that Mannin was right to praise Lawrence's book.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Wmannin.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JlawrenceDH.htm