Olivia Manning (1908–1980) was born in Portsmouth, England,
and spent much of her childhood in Northern Ireland. Her father,
Oliver, was a penniless British sailor who rose to become a naval
commander, and her mother, Olivia, had a prosperous Anglo-Irish
background. Manning trained as a painter at the Portsmouth School
of Art, then moved to London and turned to writing. She published
her first novel under her own name in 1938 (she had published
several potboilers in a local paper under the name Jacob Morrow
while a teenager). The next year she married R.D. “Reggie” Smith,
and the couple moved to Romania, where Smith was employed by the
British Council. During World War II , the couple fled before the
Nazi advance, first to Greece, then to Egypt, and finally to
Jerusalem, where they lived until the end of the war. Manning wrote
several novels during the 1950s, but her first real success as a
novelist was The Great Fortune (1960), the first of six books
concerning Guy and Harriet Pringle, whose wartime experiences and
troubled marriage echoed that of the diffident Manning and her
gregarious husband. In the 1980s these novels were collected in two
volumes, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, known
collectively as Fortunes of War. In addition to her novels, Manning
wrote essays and criticism, history, a screenplay, and a book about
Burmese and Siamese cats. She was made a Commander of the Order of
the British Empire in 1976, and died four years later.
Anthony Sattin is a journalist, broadcaster, and former
resident of Cairo. Among his published works of nonfiction are The
Gates of Africa and A Winter on the Nile. His latest book, Young
Lawrence, about the five years T. E. Lawrence spent in the Middle
East before World War I, will be published in the United States in
2015.
“Fantastically tart and readable.”
—Sarah Waters, author of Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet
“The metaphorical war between the sexes is amplified by the
nonmetaphorical war raging all around. . . . It was Manning’s
ability to paint the complex relationship between gender and power
with wit and sensitivity in her wartime novels that makes her an
important 20th century writer.”
—Lauren Elkin, The Daily Beast
“Two qualities are special to Fortunes of War—the wideness of its
panorama and its author’s temerity. No experience, civilian or
military, fazes Manning. Equally at home in Eastern Europe and the
Middle East, she manages to convince the reader that the pageantry
and misery of the world are as mutual as her view of them is
trustworthy.”
—Howard Moss, The New York Review of Books
“The finest fictional record of the war produced by a British
writer.”
—Anthony Burgess
“A tour de force . . . a picture of the Middle East in wartime
that we shall want to look at again and again.”
—The Listener
“How many Americans who have read Barbara Pym, Beryl Bainbridge, or
Iris Murdoch have ever heard of Olivia Manning? Yet she is one of
the most gifted English writers of her generation.... Nobody has
written better about World War II—the feel of fighting it and its
dislocating effects on ordinary, undistinguished lives.”
—Eve Auchincloss, The New York Times
“Olivia Manning’s greatest achievements are the Balkan and Levant
novels. In these she handles her daunting wealth of material with
great artistic dexterity and an admirable sense of proportion that
at the same time never reduces. Nor does her concern to understand
public events impair her analytical comprehension of the private
lives of her people . . . Olivia Manning wrote as courageously
about death and the fear of death—in combat, in accident, through
disease, through age—as any novelist in our language this
century.”
—Paul Binding, New Statesman
“But also the unobtrusiveness of this unforgettable book is a
function of Olivia Manning’s style. At first one wonders, ‘Why
doesn’t she write more?’ for this is a very austere and
self-denying manner. But gradually we become aware that she doesn’t
need to ‘write,’ to make things up to beguile us, because what she
has so powerfully observed is true, and she has set it down without
fuss.”
—Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
“These books are clearly among the very best fiction about the
Second World War. They are written with the English poise and
understatement that Jane Austen raised to its highest art
form.”
—Chris Patten, The Sunday Times
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