Mary Manning

Life

1906-1999 [later Mary Howe, and later again Adams]; b. 30 June in Dublin; related to the Bartons and Childers; ed. Morehampton House Sch., and Alexandra College, Dublin; studied at Abbey Acting School; played small parts with Irish Players in England, and at Abbey Theatre; went to England to train in theatre, aetat. 16; contrib. film criticism for the Irish Statesman; joined Gate Theatre as publicity manager, and formed the marginal group known as “the Anomalies”; wrote Youth’s the Season ...? (Longford Co. [Gate Th.] 1931; Westminster Th., London, 1937), a play about the narrowness of nationalist values and the failure of the new state to exploit youthful energy - with a title echoing The Beggar’s Opera and a dram. pers. incl. Ego Smith, created by Samuel Beckett (or based on him), whom she knew from childhood; other characters are Toots (fem.) and Terence and Desmond, homosexuals;

brief affair and longer correspondence with Beckett, whom she introduced to the Gate Theatre, sparking an interest in drama; edited Motley, a Gate Theatre miscellany, contributors incl. Frank O’Connor, Seán Ó Faoláin Austin Clarke, Padraic Colum, Francis Stuart, Niall Montgomery, Niall Sheridan, and the Gate directors MacLiammóir and Edwards; her third play Happy Family (Gate 1934), directed by Denis Johnston; served as Irish Times columnist; issued The Voice of Shem (1955), her play based on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, was produced by Mary O’Malley at the Poet’s Theatre, Cambridge, with advice from Denis Johnston; emigrated to Boston, where she studied art, 1935; m. Mark De Wolfe Howe, then a lawyer and later a professor at Harvard Law School;

she wrote the Mount Venus (1938) and Lovely People (1953) in Boston and worked as drama director at Radcliffe College during World War II; co-fnd. Cambridge Poets’ Theatre [Harvard], which gave the first production of her adaptation of Finnegans Wake, in April 1955; became doyen of Cambridge cultural life with hospitable apartment overlooking the Charles River; returned to Ireland on her husband’s death, 1967, and settled at Waltham Tce., Blackrock, Co. Dublin; adapted Frank O’Connor’s The Saint and Mary Kate (Abbey 1968); wrote play-reviews for Hibernia during the 1970s; issued The Last Chronicles of Ballyfungus (1978), a satirical romp; returned to America and married Faneuil Adams, of Boston, Mass., 1980; d. 25 June 1999, Boston; obituary in The Irish Times, et al.;

her account of MacLiammóir’s death-bed conversation in 1978 was recorded by Gabriel Fallon (asked by MacLiammóir if she would remove the question-mark from the title of her 1931 play, she said, ‘No, Micheal, no’); her eldest dg. Susan Howe is a celebeated American poet and winner of the 2011 Yale University Bollingen Prize in American Poetry and sometime considered herself the dg. of Samuel Beckett; her second dg. Fanny won the Pulitzer Prize with O’Clock (1995) and has written a study of her mother; Susan with her mother, have been identified with the harpies in Dream of Middling to Fair Women [1992]; her youngest dg. Helen m. Christopher Braider [infra]; Manning sold her Beckett letters to University of Texas, Austin; later sold others to Trinity College, Dublin, Library; Youth’s the Season ...? was revived at the Abbey in April-May 2025. DIW DIL/2 ATT

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Works
Drama, Youth’s the Season ...?, in Curtis Canfield, ed., Plays of Changing Ireland (NY: Macmillan 1936), pp.322-404; Storm over Wicklow and Happy Family (1934); Passages from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce: A Free Adaptation for the Theater / by Mary Manning (Cambridge: Harvard UP 1957) [adapted from James Joyce’s Tales of Shem and Shaun; also pub. as The Voice of Shem. 1955]; Frank O’Connor’s The Saint and Mary Kate (Newark: Proscenium 1970); also, Ah Well It Won’t Be Long Now (1972).

Her correspondence with Samuel Beckett is included in The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940 by Cambridge University Press (2009).

Novels, Mount Venus (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin 1938); Lovely People (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin 1953). Short fiction, The Last Chronicles of Ballyfungus (London: Routledge; Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1978) [connected stories].

Miscellaneous, Passages from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (Cambridge Mass: Harvard UP 1957); ‘I Remember It Well’, in Journal of Irish Literature, 15 (Sept. 1986), pp.17-41.

Mary Manning reads ALP in Finnegans Wake

‘Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speafing. Lpf! Folty and folty all the nights have falled on to long my hair. Not a sound, falling. Lispn! No wind no word. Only a leaf, just a leaf and then leaves. The woods are fond always. As were we their babes in. And robins in crews so. It is for me goolden wending. Unless? Away! Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long! Or is it only so mesleems? On your pondered palm. Reclined from cape to pede. With pipe on bowl. ...
... I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the ’[628].

- http://www.flashpointmag.com/manningwake.htm.

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Criticism

Mary Rose Callaghan, ‘Let’s Be Dublin’, in Journal of Irish Literature, 15 (Sept. 1986), pp.3-17 [interview].
Obituary, The Irish Times (8 July 1999).
Cathy Leeney, ‘Mary Manning: Unseasonable Youth’, in Irish Women Playwrights - 1900-1939 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 2010), pp.127-60 [author had access to papers in Manning’s home in 1994].
Christopher Murray, ‘Taking a position: Beckett, Mary Manning, and Eleutheria (1947)’, in Hiroko Mikami, et al., eds., Ireland on Stage: Beckett and After (Blackrock: Carysfort Press 2007), q.pp.

See also Mícheál Mac Liammóir, Enter Certain Players (Dublin: Dolmen 1978); Gabriel Fallon, The Abbey and the Actor (Dublin 1969); and Bernard Adams, Denis Johnston: A Life (2002) [an account of the film Guests of the Nation which she scripted after Frank O’Connor’s story (pp.131-32) -and other details of her plays and activities with the Gate.]

See also Graham Price, review of Youth"s the Season revival (Abbey Th., 2 April-3 May 2025), in Talking Movies (24 June 2025) - as infra.

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Commentary

Flashpointmag

Mary Manning Howe was an Irish born actress and playwright. She participated in productions at Dublin’s Abbey and Gate Theatres. At the Abbey theatre she worked with Yeats, and at the Gate with the famed Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards, who founded the Gate in 1928.

Her childhood friend Samuel Beckett contributed a character named Ego Smith to her 1931 play Youth’s the Season, which some say helped spark Beckett’s interest in writing drama. Her correspondence with Beckett can be found in the The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940 by Cambridge University Press (2009).

Mary and her mother Susan Manning were subjected to caricature in Beckett’s Dreams of Fair to Middling Women as “the Fricas” (i.e. “harpies”), but her lifelong friendship with Beckett survived the rough depiction. For a discussion of the Mannings as the Fricas see Chris Ackerly’s LASSATASED: Samuel Beckett’s Portraits of his Fair to Middling Women.

[...]

After moving to Boston, she headed the Idler Theatre at Radcliffe and founded the famed Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge. The list of early Poets’ Theatre participants is striking - Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Edward Gorey, W.S. Merwin, V. R. Lang, Gregory Corso, Samuel Beckett, comprise just a partial list of the poets and artists involved with Poets’ Theatre readings and productions. Richard Wilbur on Molière, Richard Eberhart, readings by Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas - an almost unending list of major poetical figures of the Twentieth Century. Alfonso Ossorio designed sets and costumes for performances of Greek Drama and for T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.

Published memoirs of the early Poets’ Theatre can be found in V. R. Lang: Poems & Plays with A Memoir by Alison Lurie (Random House, 1975), Nora Sayre’s Previous Convictions: A Journey Through the 1950s (Rutgers, 1995), and Peter Davison’s The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston, from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath (Knopf 1994).

Flashpoint also lists internet resources on Mary Manning including the Irish Film & TV Research Online, Trinity College, Dublin [TCD], [link], and excerpts from works by her daughters, Susan Howe and Fanny Howe. See also The Poets’ Theatre page edited by Andreas Teuber.

Flashpoint - online; accessed 10.12.2011.

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Cambridge Women’s Heritage Project

Born in Ireland, Mary Manning went to London to study theater when she was 16 years old. After returning to Ireland, she worked as an actress and playwright in the 1920s and 1930s at the renowned Abbey Theater and the Gate Theater in Dublin and wrote film criticism for the Irish Statesman. Two of her plays were produced at the Abbey Theater and she worked collaboratively on several projects with the playwright, Samuel Beckett who had been her childhood friend. In 1935, she emigrated to Boston and married Mark De Wolfe Howe, a lawyer who became a professor at Harvard Law School. Her three daughters were raised in Cambridge. While in Cambridge, Mary Manning Howe wrote the novel, Mount Venus (1938), and was the drama director at Radcliffe College during World War II. She helped found the Poet’s Theater in Cambridge, which produced some of Yeats’ early plays and produced work by new playwrights in the 1950s. After the death of her husband in 1967, she returned to Dublin as theater critic for The Irish Times. In 1980, she returned to Cambridge [Mass.] and married her lawyer, Faneuil Adams.

Her writings include the novel The Last Chronicles of Ballyfungus (1978), a humorous view of the Anglo-Irish gentry, and the play, Go Lovely Rose, based on the life of Rose Kennedy, produced as a one woman show at the Fourth International Women Playwright’s Conference held in Galway shortly before her death at the age of 93. One daughter, Susan Howe (born in 1937), went on to become a well-known poet and professor at State University of New York, Buffalo and another daughter Fanny Howe, became a novelist and poet, teaching creative writing at MIT and Tufts and at University of California, San Diego, publishing novels that depicted the Cambridge and Boston area in the 1970s. Mary Manning Howe Adams was 93 when she died. Her correspondence with Samuel Beckett is held in the Samuel Beckett collection at the University of Texas, Austin and her correspondence with her daughters is held at the University of California, San Diego.

References: Boston Globe 6-27-99; New York Times 6-27-1999; Samuel Beckett Collection, University of Texas, Austin; Susan Howe collection, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego.

— Cambridge Women’s Heritage Project - online.

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Graham Price, review of Youth’s the Season revival at the Abbey Theatre (Dublin), 2 April-3 May 2025), in Talking Movies (24 June 2025)”

Mary Manning’s Youth’s the Season -? was originally performed in the Gate Theatre in 1931 and written when Manning was just 26. It is a play one could describe as being a rewarding cross between Chekhov and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The title refers to a line from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera: ‘Is youth really the season made for joy?’. By removing the final part of the question from the title of her drama and thus creating a sense of confusion, Manning perfectly encapsulated one of the play’s central themes, which is the uncertainty of both youth and also of early independence Ireland; when the Irish Free State was grappling with its desire to be both reassuringly traditional in its Catholicism but also wishing to embrace some of the modernity of the Bohemian zeitgeist that was permeating Europe, and had been all the rage during the pre-1929 crash in America: A period that was known as the American ‘jazz age’. Near the beginning of the drama, one character jokingly says that he would hate to be a hero in a Chekhov play, only to have that role tragically thrust upon him at the climactic moment of the play.

The play centres on a group of vibrant young Irish people living in the centre of Dublin. These Hibernian Bright Young Things include Toots (Ciara Berkeley), Connie (Molly Hanly), Deirdre (Sadhbh Malin), Desmond (David Rawle), and Gerald (Jack Meade). These characters joyfully celebrate the freedoms and opportunities that the newly independent modern Ireland has to offer them whilst still being uneasy about the precarious future that is very possibly in store for them. The possibility that these young people’s studied urbanity might be a mask designed to cover desperation is always lurking just under the lush façade that characterises the performances of their daily lives.

The most striking moment of Youth’s the Season - ? occurs in the second part of act one when a supremely Bacchanalian party is held in the house of some of the central protagonists. The directorial style of this scene encompasses period realism and also that of the symbolist, expressionistic theatre that one would associate with a play such as Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1892). This memorable portion of the play, in both style and in content, encapsulates the liminal position in which these young characters, and the youthful Irish Free State, found themselves during the time this theatrical work is set. Youthful exuberance and a frighteningly uncontrollable sexuality are staged and performed in a manner that reminds one of what one of Jay Gatsby’s parties might have looked like should Mary Manning have undertaken the task of bringing that great novel’s West Egg ragers to the stage.

This ‘modern’ production of Mary Manning’s Youth’s the Season - ? by director Sarah Jane Scaife enacted a moment of retrospective recovery by explicitly staging what was only implicit in the play’s first production in 1931: An openly gay male interacting with a man who is probably his same-sex romantic partner. If the play had been performed then the way it was in 2025 it would have been the first Irish drama to stage a gay man and a homosexual partnership. The history of Irish drama instead states that the first gay character appeared in Thomas Kilroy’s The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche (1966) and the first gay couple in Brian Friel’s The Gentle Island (1972). This is an example of how new productions of old plays can radically reactivate the energies from the past, and use them to animate the democratically undecidable future for Ireland and Irish Studies that will happily embrace all forms of Otherness. Certain audiences at the time of the first production were well aware of the queerness of the characters in Youth’s the Season - ?, but in Dublin this remained largely unmentionable and apparently unnoticed while in London, critics responded with distaste at the characters’ ‘unnatural’ inclinations.

The Abbey’s revival of Youth’s the Season - ? allowed for a timely reminder of one of Irish Theatre’s ‘unjustly neglected and (sometimes) forgotten female dramatists’. Along with Teresa Deevy, and others, Manning is one the Irish woman playwrights who is certainly deserving of that description. This production retrospectively showcases the radicality, daring, and modernity of her dramatic aesthetic. One can only hope that it will not be too long before another major production of one of her plays graces the Irish stage again.

—Available [online; accessed 28.06.2025].

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Notes
Samuel Beckett wrote to Mary Manning: ‘I can’t read, write, drink, think, feel, or move’, and she nicknamed him Oblomov in return. (See Hugh McFadden, review of Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 1, 1929-1940, in Books Ireland, Summer 2009, p.141-42.)

Motley: The title of her Gate Theatre magazine Motley is taken from Hamlet, viz., ‘Alas, ‘tis true, I have gone here and there and made myself a motley to the view’, but possibly also with an eye on Yeats’s line, ‘here where motley is worn’ in the poem “Easter 1916”.

Kith & Kin (1): Susan Howe, Mary Manning’s eldest daughter (b. 15 Oct. 1940), a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author of O’Clock (1995) and 20 other titles in poetry, fiction and prose, believed herself and privately claimed to be the dg. of Mary Manning by Samuel Beckett in 1936 but willingly submitted to DNA testing c.2008 which showed that she was not. (See further under Samuel Beckett > Notes - supra.)

Kith & Kin (2): Fanny Howe - see William Corbett, “The Moviegoer: An Interview with Fanny Howe”, in Paris Review (19 Dec. 2016) - in which Howe, the second dg. of Mary Manning, gives an account of her friendship with Samuel Beckett to whom she turned for help when stuck in a Parisian boarding-school in her senior High-School year: ‘At first I thought of him as a nice friend of my mother, but I began to notice that I was in the presence of someone who had the truth, the way you can surmise such things when you are young. I started taking notes on what he said. I remember him saying that Descartes wrote in the fireplace. We went to see the Russian movie The Cranes Are Flying, and we both cried. We went to cafés, in one of which people jumped up and asked if he was Samuel Beckett. He recoiled, then shook their hands. He was very like my father - his face, his grim humor, his chosen isolation, his coloring, his hands and ears. I felt at ease with him.’ (Available online; accessed 23.01.2023.)

Kith & Kin (3): Christopher Braider (TCD Schol.; grad. TCD, BA 1973, PhD 1982); asst. and assoc. prof. at Harvard, resp. 1987-90 and 1990-92; Assoc. Prof. at Colorado U, 1992-2003; m. Helen Howe, Mary Manning’s youngest dg.; appt. Professor of French & Comp. Lit., 2003- ; currently emeritus [2023]; taught in the French & Italian Dept. at Boulder Univ., Colorado; issued Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700 (Princeton UP 1993) in which he argues that argues that the painted image provides a metaphor and model for all other modes of expression in Western culture.

Further: ‘By reinterpreting modern Western experience in light of northern [European] “descriptive art”, the author [Christopher Braider] enriches our understanding of how both painted and written cultural texts shape our perceptions of the world at large. Throughout Braider draws on works by such painters as van der Weyden, Bruegel the Elder, Steen, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Poussin, and addresses such topics as the Incarnation of the Word in Christ, the elegiac foundations of Enlightenment aesthetics, and the rivalry between northern and southern art. His goal is not only to reexamine important aesthetic issues but also to offer a new perspective on the general intellectual and cultural history of the modern West.’ (See Princeton Legacy Library - online; accessed 21.10.2023.] Other books by Braider incl. Indiscernible Counterparts: The Invention of French Classical Drama (2002); Baroque Self-Invention and the Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads (2004); The Matter of Mind: Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes (2012) and Experimental Selves: Person and Experience in Early Modern Europe (2018).

Corrig: Rory Johnston advises that a citation of Denis Johnston, Nine Rivers from Jordan (London: Derek Verschoyle 1953), pp.49-52, formerly given under Criticism [supra] is without grounds and should be disregarded.

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