School for Love by Olivia Manning. - 1951- Introduction by Jane Smiley 2009

School for Love by Olivia Manning - 1951

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. In World War II, the couple fled before the Nazi advance, first to Greece and then 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 (available as an NYRB Classic) and The Levant Trilogy, known collectively as The 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 Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1976, and died four years later." From The New York Review of Books. Publisher of School for Love 

School for Love is a very powerful exquisitely rendered work of art. It also has by far the best portrayal of a Siamese Cat in a literary work ever. (Sadly I cannot find her book on Burmese and Siamese cats on Amazon.)

This novel centers on Felix, a British boy whose mother has just died. Felix and his mother lived in Baghdad back when Iraq was a British colony, so Felix, whose father is also deceased, has to make a long journey home by ship at a time when berths on ships are reserved for service members, diplomats, and others who are directly working to bring the second world war to a close. He has a sort-of aunt in Jerusalem named Miss Bohun, and she offers to take him in while he waits for a place on the ship. Miss Bohun was an orphan herself and was taken in by Felix’s paternal grandparents, so she grew up with Felix’s father, as a foster-sibling. Felix has never met Miss Bohun before, but he has heard his mother grumbling about her. Felix who seems about thirteen, is first and foremost a lonely, grieving child who desperately needs love. One might think that Miss Bohun, an orphan herself, would be sympathetic to Felix’s feelings, but you would be wrong.


There is a lot of drama involving the other casts in the house.


It soon becomes clear – to the reader at least – that Miss Bohun is a manipulative monster, a rather absurd and disillusioned creature who considers herself a paragon of virtue when in fact she is anything but. She appears to have taken over the running of the house from its former occupant, the Polish refugee, Frau Leszno. Having been relegated to the position of Miss Bohun’s cook/housekeeper, Frau Leszno is currently residing in the servants’ quarters, a reversal of fortunes she deeply resents. In this scene, Miss Bohun tells Felix how she came to live at the house, clearly implying that she was doing Frau Leszno a huge favour by taking control of the situation. Or, if one looks at it another way, Miss Bohun saw an opportunity for personal gain which she seized without a moment’s hesitation. Felix falls in love with Faro, the resident Siamese cat.


You can decide for yourself if Miss Bohun knocks a pregnant war widow boarding in the house down the stairs, causing her a miscarriage, because of jealousy over others in the house liking her.


The close of School of Love really an amazing partially happy ending.


"Read today, it seems a work of uncanny prescience. The grave concerns of our own age—religious fanaticism, passionate competing territorial claims—are here in embryo, set into the precisely rendered, everyday texture of an era that has vanished. The alien British feel that Du Bois complained of in 1956 was not, in fact, cultural—it is a characteristic of Manning’s unique vision and style, her cool way of dissecting her world and her experience, in which even the most pitiable or terrifying circumstances are worthy of interested and detailed scrutiny." From Jane Smiley's introduction

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,