Olivia Manning

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Olivia Mary Manning (2 March 1908 – 23 July 1980) was a British novelist, poet, writer, and reviewer.

Her fiction and non-fiction, frequently detailing journeys and personal odysseys, were principally set in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the Middle East.

She often wrote from her personal experience, though her books also demonstrate strengths in imaginative writing.

Her books are widely admired for her artistic eye and vivid descriptions of place. Manning's youth was divided between Portsmouth and Ireland, giving her what she described as "the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere".

She attended art school and moved to London, where her first serious novel, The Wind Changes, was published in 1937.

In August 1939 she married R. D. Smith ("Reggie"), a British Council lecturer posted in Bucharest, Romania, and subsequently lived in Greece, Egypt, and Palestine as the Nazis overran Eastern Europe.

Her experiences formed the basis for her best-known work, the six novels making up The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, known collectively as Fortunes of War.

Critics judged her overall output to be of uneven quality, but this series, published between 1960 and 1980, was described by Anthony Burgess as "the finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer".Manning returned to London after the war and lived there until her death in 1980; she wrote poetry, short stories, novels, non-fiction, reviews, and drama for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Both Manning and her husband had affairs, but they never contemplated divorce.

Her relationships with writers such as Stevie Smith and Iris Murdoch were difficult, as an insecure Manning was envious of their greater success.

Her constant grumbling about all manner of subjects is reflected in her nickname, "Olivia Moaning", but Smith never wavered in his role as his wife's principal supporter and encourager, confident that her talent would ultimately be recognised.

As she had feared, real fame only came after her death in 1980, when an adaptation of Fortunes of War was televised in 1987. Manning's books have received limited critical attention; as during her life, opinions are divided, particularly about her characterisation and portrayal of other cultures.

Her works tend to minimise issues of gender and are not easily classified as feminist literature.

Nevertheless, recent scholarship has highlighted Manning's importance as a woman writer of war fiction and of the British Empire in decline.

Her works are critical of war and racism, and colonialism and imperialism; they examine themes of displacement and physical and emotional alienation.

Early years

Olivia Manning was born in North End, Portsmouth on 2 March 1908. Her father, Oliver Manning, was a naval officer who rose from naval trainee to lieutenant-commander despite a lack of formal schooling. At the age of 45, while visiting the port of Belfast, he met Olivia Morrow, a publican's daughter fourteen years his junior; they married less than a month later in December 1904, in the Presbyterian church in her home town of Bangor, County Down.

Manning adored her womanising father, who entertained others by singing Gilbert and Sullivan and reciting poetry he had memorised during long sea voyages. In contrast, her mother was bossy and domineering, with a "mind as rigid as cast-iron", and there were constant marital disputes. The initially warm relationship between mother and daughter became strained after the birth of Manning's brother Oliver in 1913; delicate and frequently ill, he was the centre of his mother's attention, much to the displeasure of Manning, who made several childish attempts to harm him. This unhappy, insecure childhood left a lasting mark on her work and personality. Manning was educated privately at a small dame school before moving to the north of Ireland in 1916, the first of several extended periods spent there while her father was at sea. In Bangor she attended Bangor Presbyterian School, and in Portsmouth Lyndon House School developing, as she recalled, "the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere". Schoolmates described her as shy and prone to tantrums; her tendency to tell boastful tall-tales about her family led to ostracism by her peers. Supported by her father, Manning read and wrote extensively, preferring novels, especially those by H. Rider Haggard. Her mother discouraged such pursuits, and confiscated material she thought unsuitable; when she found her daughter reading the Times Literary Supplement she scolded that "young men do not like women who read papers like that", and that Manning should focus on marketable job skills, such as typing.

Indeed, when financial circumstances forced Manning to leave school at sixteen, she worked as a typist and spent some time as a junior in a beauty salon. A talented artist, she took evening classes at the Portsmouth Municipal School of Art, where a fellow student described her as intellectual and aloof. In May 1928, she had a painting selected for an exhibition at Southsea, and was subsequently offered a one-woman show of her works. Manning seemed to be poised for a career as an artist, but she had meanwhile continued her interest in literature, and at the age of twenty determined instead to be a writer. Her artist's eye is apparent in her later intense descriptions of landscapes.

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Early career

Manning's first published books were three serialized detective books Rose of Rubies, Here is Murder and The Black Scarab, which appeared in the Portsmouth News in 1929 under the pseudonym Jacob Morrow. Manning did not know these books existed before the 1960s; their publication dates may have revealed her age, a mystery she kept even from her husband. Between 1929 and 1935, she wrote about 20 short stories, including a horror tale that was the first work to be published under her own name, but she kept initials to mask her gender. Manning also wrote two literary books, neither of which were accepted for publication. Edward Garnett, a literary editor at Jonathan Cape, was so moved that he asked Hamish Miles to write her a note of encouragement. Miles, a well-connected literary advisor and translator in his late teens, had invited Manning to visit if she were ever in London. Manning had already begun plans to move to Portsmouth but Miles made her more determined. Despite parental resistance, she succeeded in getting a typing job at Peter Jones' department store Peter Jones, and she moved to a run-down bed-sit in Chelsea.

Manning spent long hours after work writing about food and money. Miles took Manning under his wing, delighting her with dinners, literary discussion, and gossip, as well as giving uninhibited assistance. Manning told Manning that his wife was ineffective and no longer able to tolerate sex; the two women were soon to become lovers. Manning later remembered that "sex for both of them was the enthralling charm of life."

Manning moved to a better-paying antiquing furniture position, where she spent more than two years, while also writing in her spare time. This was "one of the best seasons" of her life, according to her. Miles was inspired by Miles' encouragement and published The Wind Changes in April 1937 by Jonathan Cape. The novel, set in Dublin during the Irish War of Independence, revolved around a woman torn between an Irish patriot and an English writer with pro-Republican sympathies. One reviewer said that "the book shows extraordinary promise." Miles learned he had an inoperable brain tumor right away, and he was banned from Manning's life soon after. Since the investigation had been kept private, she had trouble finding information about him and was unable to visit him in Edinburgh's hospital where he was dying. She left her Peter Jones job to pursue a well-paying position at the Medici Society, but was dismissed after refusing her boss's order to stop novel-writing in the evening in the evening to save her energy for the day job. Manning did previous writing assessing new books for their chances as film stars for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but Miles was too ill to see her by the time she had saved enough funds for a trip to Edinburgh. He died in December 1937.

Miles did not normally introduce his literary colleagues to each other, but he was forced by circumstance to introduce Manning to poet Stevie Smith. With regular outings to museums, cinema, and visits to Smith's Palmers Green home, which Smith shared with an eccentric aunt, the two developed an immediate rapport and enjoyed exploring London's backstreets. Manning's home, according to a mutual friend, "a sense of stability and warmth" that might have made her room in Oakley Street seem even cooler and more threadbare." Walter Allen, a writer and scholar, met Manning in 1937 and found that she had a "devastating" attitude "and that she was "as strong a young woman as anyone in London." Manning and Smith, he said, were a pair of snobs, with Manning and Smith as a pair of snobs.

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