'[Ethel] Mannin was firmly rooted in the autodidact tradition. In her father's library she enjoyed Gissing and Wells, "Adam Bede" and "The Cloister and the Hearth". A Clapham letter-sorter, he collected Nelson's Sevenpenny Classics, which she applauded as "a great boon to poor people"... By age fifteen she was quoting Wilde, Dr Johnson, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, Elizabeth Browning, Omar Khayyam, Anatole France, Emily Bronte, Shaw, Hazlitt, Stevenson, W.E. Henley, and Schopenhauer in her commonplace book...Except "Orlando", she read nothing of Virginia Woolf, whom she found "too intellectual, too subtle and complicated and remote from reality"...Mannin made sure to read "Ulysses" (or at least the final chapter) and she admired Gertrude Stein'.