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Life
1908-1980; b. Portsmouth, dg. of Commander Oliver Manning, RN, of Bangor, N. Ireland, called ‘a poor naval officer’ in OCEL; grand-dg. of David Morrow, of “the Old House at Home” Inn; spent much of her youth in Bangor, which features in her first novel, The Wind Changes (1937); m. Reginald [R. D; “Reggie”] Smith, a British Council lecturer in Romania;
her best-known work “Fortunes of War” follows substantially the real-life experence of Olivia and Reg [as Guy Pringle in the “Fortunes of War” ser.] as British Council teachers in that region during WWII; called by Anthony Burgess ‘the finest fictional account of the war produced by a British writer’, televised as Fortunes of War with Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson; d. following fall to the bottom of stairs. DIL IF2 MOR OCEL DUB
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[ Note: Reggie Smith (1914-1985) was a long-term British Council officer and BBC broadcaster; he took a teaching post in English at the New University of Ulster at its foundation in 1973. Manning was born to a working class-family and graduated from Birmingham University with the ambition of sharing his enthusiasm for literature with others - specifically Charles Dickens; overcame short-sightedness; introduced to Mary Manning by Walter Allen on [his] Smith”s return from service as British Council lecturer in Romania after graduation in Birmingham U.. Smith read her work with admiration in preparation for their first encounter; m. in Aug. 1939, with Stevie Smith as witness. They returned to Romania at the beginning of the war and later fled to Athens when his name was announced by the Nazis as that of a Russian spy. Smith found work as a teacher at Athens U., but fled to Egypt on the arrival of the Germans; worked there at Farouk U. in Cairo for British Council; became BBC producer on returning to Britain in 1945; identified as part of Communist cell and was watched by MI5; moved to Drama Dept. when his views became too flambouyant; resigned from Communist Party at the time of the invasion of Hungary in 1956; produced joint BBC/RTE Easter 1916 documentary (1966), and The Pump (1972) about advanced heart surgery; enjoyed a drinking friendship with such as Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, and W. R. [“Bertie”] Rodgers; retired from BBC in 1973 and took a lecturing post in liberal and contemporary studies at the New University of Ulster on its foundation in that year; remarried Diana Robson, a long-standing girl-friend, in 1981, a year after the death of Manning from whom he was separated during his Ulster sojourn - though divorce was never comtemplated; ; appt. visiting professor of Literary Arts at Univ. of Surrey, 1979-83; wrote a book on Anne Wickham (Free Woman and Poet); d. of cirrhosis of the liver, 3 May 1985; he was a renowned lady’s man and a passionate lover of chess, rugby and cricket.
—See Wikipeda article - where his status as a Russian spy is fully discussed - online; access 23.10.2023. ]
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Works
The Wind Changes (1937). Fortunes of War, being 2 trilogies [as infra]. See also [her] Introduction to Romanian Short Stories [World’s Classics] (OUP 1971).
Fortunes of War - two trilogies comprising “The Balkan Trilogy” which consists of The Great Fortune (1960), The Spoilt City (1962), and Friends and Heroes (1965), and “The Levant Trilogy” which consists of The Danger Tree (1977), The Battle Lost and Won (1978), and The Sum of Things (1980).
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Criticism
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Commentary
Eve Patten, Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning’s The Wartime Fiction (Cork UP 2012), offers a unique insight into the connected lives of a circle of British and Irish writers who served or lived abroad during the war years, including Lawrence Durrell, Evelyn Waugh, Derek Patmore, Keith Douglas and Patrick Leigh Fermor in a new reading of British literary history that an intersection between the confidence of pre-war ideologies and the anxieties of a dislocated post-war sensibility in relation to those writers. Further:
| ‘Manning (1908-1980) had a reputation as a difficult personality and this has threatened to obscure her reputation as a writer. The book aims to recover Manning's place as a pre-eminent novelist of British wartime experience. Manning belonged to a British literary generation which held tenaciously to its diverse Irish connections in the wartime years, but, as with Cyril Connolly or Lawrence Durrell, her claims on Irishness were intermittent and often distinctly pragmatic. ‘The book deals in depth with a diverse range of biographical, historical and literary detail. It examines the troubled interface between public and domestic narratives” and the ways in which Manning developed, through her experiences of living in Romania, Athens, Egypt and Jerusalem, her creative methods of politicising the refugee experience. As well as looking at Manning's novels within their diverse settings the book also examines the varied literary modes Manning deploys and adapts – the gothic, autobiography and writing the self, the serial novel, the wartime and epic and more. [... &c.]’ |
| —Notice from Cork University Press - publication notice [available online; 08.0.2012]. |
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References
Desmond Clarke, Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels, Tales, Romances and Folklore [Pt. 2] (Cork: Royal Carbery 1985), lists The Wind Changes (London: Jonathan Cape 1937), 320pp. [setting, west of Ireland; three characters seeking revolutionary leader to free the country; psychological interest; Elizabeth is the mistress of the other two, Seán, a lapsed Catholic, and Arion, an English poet; all self-centred and finally frustrated.]
University of Ulster Library (Morris Collection) holds The Dreaming Shore (1950).
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