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.
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