Olivia Manning: A Woman at War –2013 - by Deirdre David

 

Olivia Manning: A Woman at War by Deirdre David- 2013

Olivia Manning 

Born: March 2, 1908, Portsmouth, United Kingdom

Died: July 23, 1980 (age 72 years), Isle of Wight, United Kingdom

Partner: R. D. Smith (1939–)

Notable works: Fortunes of War Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy 

"Olivia Manning: A Woman at War is the first literary biography of the twentieth-century novelist Olivia Manning. It tells the story of a writer whose life and work were shaped by her own fierce ambition, and, like many of her generation, the events and aftermath of the Second World War. From the time she left Portsmouth for London in the mid-1930s determined to become a famous writer, through her wartime years in the Balkans and the Middle East, and until her death in London in 1980, Olivia Manning was a dedicated and hard-working author. Married to a British Council lecturer stationed in Bucharest, Olivia Manning arrived in Romania on the 3rd September 1939, the fateful day when Allied forces declared war on Germany. For the duration of World War Two, she kept one step ahead of invading German forces as she and her husband fled Romania for Greece, and then Greece for the Middle East, where they stayed until the end of the war. These tumultuous wartime years are the subject of her best-known and most transparently autobiographical novels, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy.

Olivia Manning refused to be labelled a 'feminist,' but her novels depict with cutting insight and sardonic wit the marginal position of women striving for independent identity in arenas frequently controlled by men, whether on the frontlines of war or in the publishing world of the 1950s. However, she did not just write about World War Two and women's lives. Amongst other things, Manning published fiction about making do in Britain's post-war Age of Austerity, about desecration of the environment through uncontrolled development, and about the painful adjustment to post-war British life for young men. As the author of thirteen published novels, two volumes of short stories, several works of non-fiction, and a regular reviewer of contemporary fiction, she was a visible presence on the British literary scene throughout her life and her work provides a detailed insight into the period.

Grounded in thorough research and enriched by discussion of previously unexamined manuscripts and letters, Olivia Manning: A Woman at War is a timely study of Olivia Manning's remarkable life. Deirdre David integrates incisive critical analysis of Manning's writing with extensive discussion of the historical contexts of her fiction." From Oxford University Press 

Olivia Manning: Writer and War introduced me to an Writer I should have long ago read. Manning was friends or at least acquainted with many well known literary figures. She was very close to the poet Stevie Smith. Her novels deal extensively on marriages. Her own was problematic but shaped her life. She was totally into the reading life from her childhood on. David showed what Manning's life was like during World War Two and in the highly rationed days in post War London. Manning was seen by some as a "difficult" person, judgemental and superior. She had numerous sexual partners as did her husband. She became pregnant at 36 but the child died in her uterus at seven months but she has to carry it until it was delivered at nine months. She never emotionally recovered from this.

Deirdre David is Professor of English Emerita at Temple University. She has been a member of the faculty at Smith College, the University of Maryland, and Temple University. At Temple she was chair of the department for five years and, throughout her teaching career, has offered undergraduate and graduate classes in Victorian Literature, the History of the British Novel, Postcolonial Literature, and British Literature Since 1945.

Professor David is the author of Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels (1981), Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy (1987), Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing (1995), and Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life (2007).  She is also the editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (2001) and co-editor (with Eileen Gillooly) of Contemporary Dickens (Ohio State University Press,