Olivia Manning

Life
1908-1980; b. Portsmouth, dg. Commander Oliver Manning, RN, of Bangor, called ‘a poor naval officer’ [OCEL]; spent much of her youth in of Ireland; grand-dg. of David Morrow, of ‘the Old House at Home’ inn; m. R. [‘Reg’] D. Smith, British Council lecturer and lecturer at NUU; Bangor features in first novel, The Wind Changes (1937); “The Balkan Trilogy” follows substantially the real-life experence of Olivia and Reg as British Council teachers in that region during WWII; called by Anthony Burgess ‘the finest fictional account of the war produced by a British writer’, televised as Fortunes of War with Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson; d. following fall to bottom of stairs. DIL IF2 MOR OCEL DUB

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Works
The Wind Changes (1937); Balkan Trilogy (1960-1965); Levant Trilogy (1977-1980). See also [her] Introduction to Romanian Short Stories [World’s Classics] (OUP 1971).

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Criticism
  • Neville & June Braybrooke, Olivia Manning (London: Chatto 2004), 310pp. [reviewed by Philip Hensher in Spectator, 30 Oct. 2004, p.46f.)
  • Eve Patten, Imperial Refugee: the wartime fiction of Olivia Manning (forthcoming 2011).

See also John Metcalf, ‘North Down’s Literary Associations’, Supplement to Fortnight Review (Sept. 1993) [short notice]; Eve Patten on Manning in That Island Never Found: Essays and Poems for Terence Brown, ed. Nicholas Allen & Patten (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2007), q.pp.

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References
Desmond Clarke, Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels, Tales, Romances and Folklore [Pt. 2] (Cork: Royal Carbery 1985), lists The Wind Changes (London: Jonathan Cape 1937), 320pp. [setting, west of Ireland; three characters seeking revolutionary leader to free the country; psychological interest; Elizabeth is the mistress of the other two, Seán, a lapsed Catholic, and Arion, an English poet; all self-centred and finally frustrated.]

University of Ulster Library (Morris Collection) holds The Dreaming Shore (1950).

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