 Manning's books are not easily classified as a part of the feminist canon. While Manning supported the rights of women, particularly equal literary fees, she had no sympathy for the Women's Movement, writing that "[t] hey make such an exhibition of themselves. None can be said to be beauties. Most have faces like porridge." In Manning's books, the word "feminine" is used in a derogatory sense, and tends to be associated with female complacency, foolishness, artifice and deviousness, and fulfilment for women comes in fairly conventional roles of wife, mother and the private domain. Elizabeth Bowen remarked that Manning had "an almost masculine outfit in the way of experience" that influenced her writing about women and the war. Manning viewed herself not as a female writer, but as a writer who happened to be a woman, and early in her career she obscured her gender using a pseudonym and initials. Manning found it easier to create male characters, and in general her novels tend to minimise differences in gender, writing about people rather than women in particular. Harriet Pringle, for example, moves through processes of self-discovery and empowerment as an individual rather than in feminist solidarity with her sex. In Manning's The Doves of Venus (1960), based on Manning's friendship with Stevie Smith, female characters display "the 1950s anger more often associated ... with young men." Treglown comments on how Manning's early books generally took a forthright approach to sex, often initiated by female characters. Her approach became more nuanced in later volumes, with a subtler depiction of sex, sensuality and sexual frustration in Fortunes of War. The Jungian critic Richard Sugg interpreted Manning's female characters as punishing themselves for breaching society's gender norms, including for having erotic feelings. In contrast, Treglown hypothesised that it reflected Manning's ongoing grieving for her stillborn child.
