Gilbert Cannan (June 25 1884 – June 30 1955) was a British novelist and dramatist.

Born in Manchester, He got on badly with his family, and in 1897 he was sent to live in Oxford with the economist Edwin Cannan . He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and King's College, Cambridge; he started on a legal career, but turned to writing in 1908, after a short spell as an actor.

He was employed as secretary by J. M. Barrie. A relationship developed in 1909 between Cannan and Barrie's wife Mary (nee Ansell), an actress. Barrie divorced Mary in a high-profile case, and she and Cannan were married in 1910.

He worked first as a translator, and reviewed in London publications. Many of his novels are in part autobiographical, and fit into a novel sequence the Lawrie Saga, around the character Stephen Lawrie. Samuel Butler was a major influence on his fiction.

During World War I he was a pacifist and then conscientious objector, and was involved in the National Council Against Conscription . He used his experiences in later novels, making the character Melian Stokes in Pugs and Peacocks a portrait of Bertrand Russell. He had known Ottoline Morrell from before the war. During it he moved in her circle, introducing her to D. H. Lawrence, and knew also Dora Carrington, Dorothy Brett and the artist Mark Gertler . Cannan's book Mendel was based on Gertler's early life (Mendel being his Yiddish given name). Gertler painted Gilbert Cannan and his Mill. The mill was at Cholesbury in Buckinghamshire, where Cannan was living in 1916, and which attracted a number of his intellectual circle (including Lawrence and his wife Frieda, and Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry). The picture also shows the Newfoundland dog Luath who was possibly the original of Nana from Peter Pan.

His marriage broke up during 1918, when he had an affair with Gwen Wilson; who then dropped him for Henry Mond .

After the war Cannan was writing and translating a great deal, and travelled. A breakdown in 1923 proved untreatable and he spent the rest of his life confined to a mental hospital.

The poet May Wedderburn Cannan and her sister, writer Joanna Cannan , were cousins of his, daughters of the academic Charles Cannan; Joanna's daughterDiana Pullein-Thompson was his biographer.

Works

• Jean-Christophe by Romain Rolland (1910-1913) translator
• Peter Homunculus (1909) first novel
• Heinrich Heine's Memoirs, edited by Gustav Karpeles (1910) translator
• Devious Ways (1910) novel
• Little Brother (1912) novel
• The Joy of the Theatre (1913) essays
• Four Plays (1913)
• Round The Corner (1913) novel
• Love (1914)
• Old Mole (1914) novel
• Old Mole's Novel (1914) novel
• Satire (1914)
• Young Earnest - The Romance Of A Bad Start In Life (1915)
• Samuel Butler: A Critical Study (1915)
• Windmills: A Book of Fables (1915) fantasy
• Three Pretty Men (1916) novel
• Mendel: a story of youth (1916) novel, loosely based on Mark Gertler 's early life
• The House with the Mezzanine, and Other Stories by Anton Chekov(1917) translator with S. S. Koteliansky
• The Stucco House (1917) novel
• The Anatomy of Society (1919)
• Time and Eternity (1919)
• Pink roses (1919)
• My Life (1920)
• Pugs and Peacocks (1921)
• Sembal (1922)
• Annette and Bennety (1922)
• Noel - An Epic in Seven Cantos (1922)
• Seven Plays (1923)
• House of Prophecy (1924)
• Diary of A.O. Barnabooth by Valerie Larbaud , translator

Reference

• Gilbert Cannan: a Georgian prodigy (1978) Diana Farr (Diana Pullein-Thompson)