Edna Manley - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Edna Manley was the daughter of English cleric Harvey Swithenbank and his Jamaican wife, Ellie Shearer. Her father died when Edna was nine, leaving his widow to raise their nine children by herself. Edna Manley was highly independent and spirited. She attended several art schools in a two-year period, as she sensed that these schools were incredibly limited in what they offered.

As a young woman, she took private art classes with the artist Maurice Harding. She went on to continue her art studies at the Regent Street Polytechnic as well as the St. Martin's School of Art in London.

In 1921, she married her cousin, Norman Manley, and moved to Jamaica with him in 1922. They had two children, Michael Manley (a future prime minister) and Douglas Manley, a sociologist and minister in his brother's government.

Read more about this topic:  Edna Manley

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:

    “[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.”
    —Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)

    “Surely among a rich man’s flowering lawns,
    Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
    Life overflows without ambitious pains;
    And rains down life until the basin spills,
    And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
    As though to choose whatever shape it wills....”
    —William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

    “Until we devise means of discovering workers who are temperamentally irked by monotony it will be well to take for granted that the majority of human beings cannot safely be regimented at work without relief in the form of education and recreation and pleasant surroundings.”
    —Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)