Olivia Manning (b. 2 Mar 1911, Portsmouth, d. 23 Jul, 1980, Ryde, IOW) was a novelist, journalist, poet, and non-fiction author, best known for the Fortunes of War series (which included The Balkan Trilogy (1956–64) and The Levant Trilogy (1977–81). Her works saw success primarily after her death, with the BBC adaptation of The Fortunes of War in 1987, but critics have pointed to the importance of her treatment of feminism, war, colonialism, and imperialism, and her work offers a strong focus on individual alienation that sometimes sees her bracketed alongside her friend and fellow-writer Iris Murdoch.
The daughter of a naval officer, Manning was born in Portsmouth and spent her early years in North End. Her childhood was divided between Portsmouth, where she attended Portsmouth Grammar School and the North of Ireland. Family life was difficult emotionally and financially, and her adult life was also turbulent. Pursuing a career as an artist, Manning enrolled at the Portsmouth Municipal School of Art. In 1928, one of her paintings was selected for exhibition in Southsea and she was offered a one-woman show.
In 1931, however, she decided on a literary career, publishing three detective novels, Rose of Rubies, Here is Murder, and The Black Scarab under the pseudonym Jacob Morrow in the Portsmouth News in 1929. Writing two novels and more than twenty short stories in the period that followed, Manning struggled to find publishers and decided to relocate from Portsmouth to Chelsea, where she started a series of low-paid jobs before publishing the Irish independence struggle novel, The Wind Changes in 1937. Manning’s turbulent marriage to British Council lecturer Reggie Smith took the couple to Romania just as WWII broke out. Their experiences in Greece, Egypt, and Palestine as they fled Nazism are an inspiration for The Fortunes of War, and it was during this period that Manning worked as a journalist for several titles. Manning’s health and well-being were affected for the rest of her life by amoebic dystentery contracted during this period, and by the death of her child in utero in 1944. After a brief stay in post-war Portsmouth, the couple returned to London. During this period she wrote School for Love (1951), The Doves of Venus (1955), and Extraordinary Cats (1967), but during her lifetime Manning never received the recognition she felt she deserved. She died of a stroke in the Isle of Wight and her ashes were buried at Billingham Manor, south of Newport.
For those wishing to find out more about Manning, Deirdre David's A Woman at War is a good starting place.
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