page_title: Olivia Manning
section_title: Early years
hierarchical_section_title: Olivia Manning / Early years
caption_attribution_description: English: Portsmouth UK
context_page_description: Olivia Mary Manning CBE was a British novelist, poet, writer, and reviewer. Her fiction and non-fiction, frequently detailing journeys and personal odysseys, were principally set in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the Middle East. She often wrote from her personal experience, though her books also demonstrate strengths in imaginative writing. Her books are widely admired for her artistic eye and vivid descriptions of place.
  Manning's youth was divided between Portsmouth and Ireland, giving her what she described as "the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere". She attended art school and moved to London, where her first serious novel, The Wind Changes, was published in 1937. In August 1939 she married R. D. Smith, a British Council lecturer posted in Bucharest, Romania, and subsequently lived in Greece, Egypt, and British Mandatory Palestine as the Nazis overran Eastern Europe. Her experiences formed the basis for her best-known work, the six novels making up The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, known collectively as Fortunes of War.
context_section_description: Olivia Manning was born in North End, Portsmouth on 2 March 1908. Her father, Oliver Manning, was a naval officer who rose from naval trainee to lieutenant-commander despite a lack of formal schooling. At the age of 45, while visiting the port of Belfast, he met Olivia Morrow, a publican's daughter fourteen years his junior; they married less than a month later in December 1904, in the Presbyterian church in her home town of Bangor, County Down.
  Manning adored her womanising father who entertained others by singing Gilbert and Sullivan and reciting poetry he had memorised during long sea voyages. In contrast, her mother was bossy and domineering, with a "mind as rigid as cast-iron", and there were constant marital disputes. The initially warm relationship between mother and daughter became strained after the birth of Manning's brother Oliver in 1913; delicate and frequently ill, he was the centre of his mother's attention, much to the displeasure of Manning, who made several childish attempts to harm him. This unhappy, insecure childhood left a lasting mark on her work and personality.
  Manning was educated privately at a small dame school before moving to the north of Ireland in 1916, the first of several extended periods spent there while her father was at sea. In Bangor she attended Bangor Presbyterian School, and in Portsmouth Lyndon House School then Portsmouth Grammar School, developing, as she recalled, "the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere". Schoolmates described her as shy and prone to tantrums; her tendency to tell boastful tall-tales about her family led to ostracism by her peers. Supported by her father, Manning read and wrote extensively, preferring novels, especially those by H. Rider Haggard. Her mother discouraged such pursuits, and confiscated material she thought unsuitable; when she found her daughter reading the Times Literary Supplement she scolded that "young men do not like women who read papers like that", and that Manning should focus on marketable job skills, such as typing.
  Indeed, when financial circumstances forced Manning to leave school at sixteen, she worked as a typist and spent some time as a junior in a beauty salon. A talented artist, she took evening classes at the Portsmouth Municipal School of Art, where a fellow student described her as intellectual and aloof. In May 1928, she had a painting selected for an exhibition at Southsea, and was subsequently offered a one-woman show of her works. Manning seemed to be poised for a career as an artist, but she had meanwhile continued her interest in literature, and at the age of twenty determined instead to be a writer. Her artist's eye is apparent in her later intense descriptions of landscapes.
caption: Portsmouth Grammar School
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