Olivia Manning

Olivia Manning (2 March 1908 – 23 July 1980) was a British novelist whose six-volume sequence Fortunes of War — comprising the Balkan Trilogy (The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City, Friends and Heroes) and the Levant Trilogy (The Danger Tree, The Battle Lost and Won, The Sum of Things) — is one of the great achievements of postwar British fiction and the finest fictional account of the Second World War written from the civilian perspective. Anthony Burgess placed it at number forty-two in his list of the ninety-nine best novels in English since 1939 and called it “the finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer.”

Early Life

Manning was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, the daughter of a naval officer. She grew up in Northern Ireland and moved to London in her twenties, where she worked as a typist and began writing. She published her first novel, The Wind Changes (1937), set during the Irish Civil War, and married R.D. “Reggie” Smith, a British Council lecturer, in 1939. Within weeks of their marriage, they were posted to Bucharest — and it was this posting, and their subsequent wartime perambulations through Romania, Greece, Egypt, and Palestine, that provided the material for Fortunes of War.

The Balkan Trilogy (1960–1965)

The Great Fortune (1960) introduces Guy and Harriet Pringle, a newly married English couple arriving in Bucharest in the autumn of 1939 as Europe slides into war. Guy is an extravagantly generous, politically idealistic British Council lecturer who gives his time, his money, and his attention to everyone except his wife. Harriet is observant, sharp-tongued, emotionally starved, and increasingly frustrated by Guy’s obliviousness. Around them, Bucharest’s polyglot society — Romanian aristocrats, White Russian refugees, British expatriates, German diplomats, and assorted con men — carries on with parties, intrigues, and affairs as the political situation deteriorates.

The Spoilt City (1962) follows the Pringles through the fall of Romania to the Iron Guard and the Nazis. Friends and Heroes (1965) takes them to Athens, where they witness the Italian invasion of Greece and the fall of another European capital.

The trilogy’s great strength is its rendering of history at the level of daily life — the way ordinary people experience great events not as grand narratives but as shortages, rumours, queues, inconveniences, and sudden, arbitrary violence.

The Levant Trilogy (1977–1980)

Manning returned to the Pringles’ story after a gap of twelve years. The Danger Tree (1977) shifts the setting to Cairo and introduces a parallel narrative following Simon Boulderstone, a young officer in the desert campaign. The Battle Lost and Won (1978) is set during the Battle of Alamein. The Sum of Things (1980), published shortly after Manning’s death, brings both narratives to their conclusions.

The Levant Trilogy is sometimes considered less accomplished than the Balkan Trilogy, but the desert war sections are superb — Manning renders the experience of waiting, boredom, dust, heat, and sudden combat with the same precision she brought to Bucharest society.

Harriet Pringle

The character of Harriet Pringle is one of the finest portraits of a woman in mid-twentieth-century British fiction. She is intelligent, perceptive, and emotionally honest in a way that makes her husband’s generosity look like a form of selfishness — Guy gives himself to the world but withholds himself from her. The marriage is never romanticised, and Harriet’s growing independence and self-reliance are portrayed with a sympathetic precision that reflects Manning’s own wartime experience.

Reputation

Manning was frustrated throughout her career by what she perceived as insufficient critical recognition. She was reviewed respectfully but never enthusiastically, and she was jealous of contemporaries — particularly Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark — who received more attention. The 1987 BBC television adaptation of Fortunes of War, starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh as Harriet and Guy, brought her work to a wide audience and initiated a critical reappraisal that has continued to the present day.

She is now recognised as one of the most important British novelists of the postwar period, and Fortunes of War is securely in the canon of World War II fiction.

Collecting Manning

The Great Fortune (1960, Heinemann) in first edition with dust jacket is the most sought-after title, bringing $200–$500. The complete six-volume set in first editions is desirable. The Sum of Things (1980), published shortly after her death, is less common. The BBC adaptation increased interest in Manning’s work significantly.