Ruth Manning-Sanders

Ruth Manning-Sanders
Born	(1886-08-21)21 August 1886 Swansea, Wales
Died	12 October 1988(1988-10-12) (aged 102) Penzance, Cornwall
Occupation	Author

Ruth Manning-Sanders (21 August 1886 – 12 October 1988) was a prolific British poet and author who was perhaps best known for her series of children's books in which she collected and retold fairy tales from all over the world. All told, she published more than 90 books during her lifetime.

Biography

Ruth Vernon Manning was the youngest of three daughters of John Manning, an English Unitarian minister. She was born in Swansea, Wales, but, when she was three, her family moved to Cheshire, England. As a child, she had a great interest in reading books on many topics. She and her two sisters wrote and acted in their own plays. She described her childhood as "extraordinarily happy ... with kind and understanding parents and any amount of freedom."

According to an autobiographical story she tells in the foreword to Scottish Folk Tales, she spent her summers in a farmhouse the Scottish Highlands named "Shian", which according to Manning-Sandersmeans the place where fairies live; there old Granny Stewart loved to tell stories and Manning-Sanders loved to listen to them.

Manning-Sanders studied English literature and Shakespearean studies at Manchester University. She married English artist George Sanders in 1911 (they changed their name to Manning-Sanders) and spent much of her early married life touring Great Britain with a horse-drawn caravan and working in the circus (a topic she wrote about extensively). Eventually, the family moved into a cottage in the fishing hamlet of Land's End, Cornwall. She and her husband had two children together, one of whom, Joan Floyd (17 May 1913, to 9 May 2002), found some fame as a teenage artist in the 1920s while under her maiden name of Joan Manning-Sanders.

After the Second World War and the accidental death of her husband in 1952, Manning-Sanders published dozens of fairy-tale anthologies, mostly during the 1960s and '70s. Many of them had titles beginning with "A Book of..." Some titles, therefore, were A Book of Wizards, A Book of Dwarfs, and so forth.

In the foreword to her 1971 fairy-tale anthology, A Choice of Magic, Manning-Sanders writes:

There can be no new fairy tales. They are records of the time when the world was very young; and never, in these latter days, can they, or anything like them, be told again. Should you try to invent a new fairy tale you will not succeed: the tale rings false, the magic is spurious. For the true world of magic is ringed round with high, high walls that cannot be broken down. There is but one little door in the high walls which surround that world – the little door of "once upon a time and never again." And so it must suffice that we can enter through that little door into the fairy world and take our choice of all its magic.

In the forewords to some fairy-tale compilations, Manning-Sanders discusses the origins of the tales she is retelling. The stories in A Book of Dragons hail from Greece, China, Japan, Macedonia, Ireland, Romania and Germany, among other places. Manning-Sanders goes out of her way to state that "not all dragons want to gobble up princesses." She thus includes tales of kind and proud dragons, along with the savage ones.

Some insight into how Manning-Sanders believes fairy tales should usually end can be gleaned from a passage in her foreword to A Book of Witches:

Now in all these stories, as in fairy tales about witches in general, you may be sure of one thing: however terrible the witches may seem – and whatever power they may have to lay spells on people and to work mischief – they are always defeated. ... Because it is the absolute and very comforting rule of the fairy tale that the good and brave shall be rewarded, and that bad people shall come to a bad end.

Along those same lines, Manning-Sanders notes in the foreword to A Book of Princes and Princesses:

And so you will find, as you read these stories, that they all have one thing in common. Though they come from many different countries, and were told long, long ago by simple people separated that they may not even have known of each other's existence, yet the stories these people told are all alike in this: they every one have a happy ending.

While many of the tales Manning-Sanders relates in her various fairy-tale anthologies are not commonly known, she also includes stories about some famous literary and cultural characters, such as Baba Yaga, Jack the Giant-Killer, Anansi, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Robin Hood and Aladdin. The dust jacket for A Book of Giants describes her writing style: "Mrs. Manning-Sanders tells the stories with wit and good humor. There is not a word wasted."

Manning Sanders died in 1988 in Penzance, England.

In the February 1989 issue of The Junior Bookshelf, Marcus Crouch wrote, "For many long-lived writers, death is followed by eclipse. I hope that publishers will (continue to re-release Manning-Sanders') priceless treasury of folk-tales. We would all be the poorer for their loss."

Notes

Many of her children's fairy-tale titles were illustrated, quite memorably, by Robin Jacques, who was quoted as saying "My preference is for children's books of the more imaginative and fanciful kind, since these leave greater scope for illustrative invention, where I feel most at home. Thus, my work with Ruth Manning-Sanders has proved most satisfying, and the twenty-five books we have done together contain much of the work that I feel personally happiest with."
Others who illustrated her fairy-tale titles included Victor Ambrus, Scoular Anderson, Eileen Armitage, Raymond Briggs, Donald Chaffin, Brian Froud, Lynette Hemmant, C. Walter Hodges, J. Hodgson, Annette Macarthur-Onslow, Constance Marshall, Kilmeny Niland, William Papas, Trevor Ridley, Jacqueline Rizvi, Leon Shtainmets, William Stobbs, and Astrid Walford.
For children's literature, Manning-Sanders' American and international publishers included E. P. Dutton, Heinemann, McBride, Laurie, Oxford University Press, Roy, Methuen & Co. Ltd., Hamish Hamilton, Watts and Co. (London), Thomas Nelson, Angus & Robertson and Lippincott.
She worked for two years with Rosaire's Circus in England. Some of her fiction and non-fiction is inspired by her time with the circus. The novel The Golden Ball: A Novel of the Circus (1954) is said to have some parallels to the life of Leon LaRoche, a famed circus performer who was with Barnum & Bailey Circus from 1895 through 1902.
She was a poet and novelist, most notably in the years prior to World War II. At least two of her early collections of poetry – Karn and Martha Wish-You-Ill were published by Hogarth Press, the hand-printed publishing house run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
Three of her poems are featured in the 1918 volume "Twelve Poets, a Miscellany of New Verse," which includes 10 poems by Edward Thomas.
She won the Blindman International Poetry Prize in 1926 for The City.
She was, for a time, a poetry protegee of the English author Walter de la Mare. De la Mare took at least one holiday to the Manning-Sanders' residence in Cornwall.
When living in Sennen, Cornwall, Manning-Sanders was, for a time, a neighbour of British writer Mary Butts.
Her short story, "John Pettigrew's Mirror," was published in "One and All – A Selection of Stories from Cornwall," a 1951 anthology (edited by Denys Val Baker). The story was republished at least once, in the 1988 anthology "Ghost Stories" (edited by Robert Westall).
Her story, "The Goblins at the Bath House," from A Book of Ghosts and Goblins is read by Vincent Price on an LP titled "The Goblins at the Bath House & The Calamander Chest," which was published by Caedmon in 1978 (TC 1574).

Selected bibliography

Complete list of "A Book of..." titles

A Book of Giants, 1962
A Book of Dwarfs, 1963
A Book of Dragons, 1964
A Book of Witches', 1965
A Book of Wizards, 1966
A Book of Mermaids, 1967
A Book of Ghosts and Goblins, 1968
A Book of Princes and Princesses, 1969
A Book of Devils and Demons, 1970
A Book of Charms and Changelings, 1971
A Book of Ogres and Trolls, 1972
A Book of Sorcerers and Spells, 1973
A Book of Magic Animals, 1974
A Book of Monsters, 1975
A Book of Enchantments and Curses, 1977
A Book of Kings and Queens, 1977
A Book of Marvels and Magic, 1978
A Book of Spooks and Spectres, 1979
A Book of Cats and Creatures, 1981
A Book of Heroes and Heroines, 1982
A Book of Magic Adventures, 1983
A Book of Magic Horses, 1984

Other selected titles

The Pedlar and Other Poems, 1919
Karn, 1922
Pages from the History of Zachy Trenoy – Sometime Labourer in the Hundred of Penwith, 1922
The Twelve Saints, 1926
Martha Wish-You-Ill, 1922
The City, 1927
Waste Corner, 1927
Selina Pennaluna, 1927
Hucca's Moor, 1929
The Crochet Woman, 1930
The Growing Trees, 1931
She Was Sofia, 1932
Run Away, 1934
Mermaid's Mirror, 1935
The Girl Who Made an Angel, 1936
Children by the Sea, 1938 (published in United States as Adventure May Be Anywhere)
Elephant: The Romance of Laura, 1938
Luke's Circus, 1939
Mystery at Penmarth, 1941
The West of England, 1949 (non-fiction)
Swan of Denmark: The Story of Hans Christian Andersen, 1949 (non-fiction)
Seaside England, 1951 (non-fiction)
The River Dart, 1951 (non-fiction)
The English Circus, 1952 (non-fiction)
Mr. Portal's Little Lions, 1952
The Golden Ball: A Novel of the Circus, 1954
Melissa, 1957
Peter and the Piskies: Cornish Folk and Fairy Tales, 1958
A Bundle of Ballads, 1959
Circus Boy, 1960
Red Indian Folk and Fairy Tales, 1960
Animal Stories, 1961 (non-fiction)
Birds, Beasts, and Fishes, 1962 (editor, an anthology of natural history poetry)
The Smugglers, 1962
The Red King and the Witch: Gypsy Folk and Fairy Tales, 1964
Damian and the Dragon: Modern Greek Folk-Tales, 1965
The Crow's Nest, 1965
Slippery Shiney, 1965
The Extraordinary Margaret Catchpole, 1966 (fictionalised biography)
The Magic Squid, 1968
Stories from the English and Scottish Ballads, 1968
The Glass Man and the Golden Bird: Hungarian Folk and Fairy Tales, 1968
Jonnikin and the Flying Basket: French Folk and Fairy Tales, 1969
The Spaniards Are Coming!, 1969
Gianni and the Ogre, 1970
A Book of Magical Beasts, 1970 (editor)
A Choice of Magic, 1971
The Three Witch Maidens, 1972
Festivals, 1973
Stumpy: A Russian Tale, 1974
Grandad and the Magic Barrel, 1974
Old Dog Sirko: A Ukrainian Tale, 1974
Sir Green Hat and the Wizard, 1974
Tortoise Tales, 1974
Ram and Goat, 1974
Young Gabby Goose, 1975
Scottish Folk Tales, 1976
Fox Tales, 1976
The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse: Aesop's Fable Retold, 1977
Robin Hood and Little John, 1977
Old Witch Boneyleg, 1978
The Cock and the Fox, 1978
Boastful Rabbit, 1978
Folk and Fairy Tales, 1978
The Haunted Castle, 1979
Robin Hood and the Gold Arrow, 1979
Oh Really, Rabbit!, 1980
Hedgehog and Puppy Dog, 1982
Tales of Magic and Mystery, 1985
A Cauldron of Witches, 1988

Ruth Manning-Sanders

Biography

Notes

Selected bibliography

Further reading