in September 1940 of the outriders of a German delegation after Romania and Germany have signed a pact. Harriet notes how the appearance of elegant German officers makes an erotic impression on watching women. The acuity of observation could only come from Manning’s own direct experience: Anyhow, I hope Manning was being satirical. Armies shattered, peasants starving, leaders deposed, yet the members of the British Legation feed their higher purpose by innocently reading Miss Austen.

Clarence Lawson, a colleague of Guy's in Bucharest. An embittered cynic and moper, he is employed by the British propaganda bureau and on relief to Polish refugees. Manning was the perfect person to write this book. Indifferent to the systems of thought that obsessed her husband, she was instead fascinated by people, their interactions, and circumstance. “If you were more interested in people,” Harriet snaps at Guy at one point, “you might not like them so much.” She was also blessed with a photographic memory for individuals, places, and things. “She never forgets a detail,” Reggie was to say proudly of her. “Even twenty years after we were in Cairo, she could remember every sepia photograph hanging on the walls of the first pension in which we stayed.”

Aiden Pratt, a successful pre-war West End stage actor, now conscripted into the pay corps in Damascus, who befriends Guy and Harriet. There are dozens of sharply delineated characters in the Balkan trilogy - and Manning has a real gift for tragicomic flair, as in her depiction of Yakimov and his visit to his Nazi friend.

In 1942 Smith was appointed as Controller of English and Arabic Programming at the Palestine Broadcasting Service in Jerusalem; the job was to begin later but in early July, with the German troops rapidly advancing on Egypt, he persuaded Manning to go ahead to Jerusalem to "prepare the way". [90] [91] Palestine [ edit ] Manning's books have received limited critical attention; as during her life, opinions are divided, particularly about her characterisation and portrayal of other cultures. Her works tend to minimise issues of gender and are not easily classified as feminist literature. Nevertheless, recent scholarship has highlighted Manning's importance as a woman writer of war fiction and of the British Empire in decline. Her works are critical of war and racism, and colonialism and imperialism; they examine themes of displacement and physical and emotional alienation. In July 1939, Walter Allen introduced Manning to the charming Marxist R. D. "Reggie" Smith. [30] [31] [32] Smith was a large, energetic man, possessed of a constant desire for the company of others. [33] The son of a Manchester toolmaker, he had studied at Birmingham University, where he had been coached by the left-wing poet Louis MacNeice and founded the Birmingham Socialist Society. [34] According to the British intelligence organisation MI5, Smith had been recruited as a communist spy by Anthony Blunt on a visit to Cambridge University in 1938. [35] The Smiths initially rented a flat, but later moved in with the diplomat Adam Watson, who was working with the British Legation. [43] Those who knew Manning at the time described her as a shy, provincial girl who had little experience with other cultures. She was both dazzled and appalled by Romania. The café society, with its wit and gossip, appealed to her, but she was repelled by the peasantry and the aggressive, often mutilated, beggars. [44] [45] Her Romanian experiences were captured in the first two volumes of The Balkan Trilogy ( The Great Fortune and The Spoilt City), considered one of the most important literary treatments of Romania during the war. In her novels, Manning described Bucharest as being on the margins of European civilisation, "a strange, half-Oriental capital" that was "primitive, bug-ridden and brutal", whose citizens were peasants, whatever their wealth or status. [45] [46] Soldiers marching in Bucharest, 1941The trilogy remains excitingly vivid; it amuses, it diverts and it informs, and to do these things so elegantly is no small achievement. Langley, William. "Emma Thompson: Can she cut it on the stage?". The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group Limited . Retrieved 15 June 2015. Foxy Leverett, a diplomat who is also working for the British secret service. He is murdered by the fascist Iron Guard in Bucharest. The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review.

The novels describe the experiences of a young married couple, Harriet and Guy Pringle, early in World War II. A lecturer and passionate Communist, Guy is attached to a British Council educational establishment in Bucharest ( Romania) when war breaks out, and the couple are forced to leave the country, passing through Athens and ending up in Cairo, Egypt. Harriet is persuaded to return home by ship, but changes her mind at the last minute and goes to Damascus with friends. Guy, hearing that the ship has been torpedoed, for a time believes her to be dead, but they are eventually reunited. Fortunes is unashamedly autobiographical, a creative reconstruction of actual people and events, with the fictionalized emotional battleground of Manning’s marriage to the ebullient Reggie Smith mirroring the wider conflict. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.Lassner, Phyllis (1998), British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of Their Own, Basingstoke: Macmillan, ISBN 978-0-333-72195-7, OCLC 231719380 .

a b Rossen, Janice (2003), Women writing modern fiction: a passion for ideas, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.11–14, ISBN 0-333-61420-8 The Great Fortune ( The Balkan Trilogy; UK: 1960, 1961, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1973, 1974, 1980, 1988, 1992, 1994, 1995 2000; US: 1961)

David Boyd, a part-time lecturer and an expert on Romanian history and politics employed by the British Embassy. He is a close friend and a Marxist political ally of Guy. It was a pre-war marriage, the Pringle’s, which makes it sound more like portent than a save-the-date calendar event. A hurried thing, too. Don’t want to miss that war. A young English couple. He (Guy): an idealist-communist, too myopic for soldiering (and maybe just too myopic, generally); a teacher of English literature, determined to do ‘his part’ by, well, teaching English Literature. She (Harriet): an observer, really; defined, even by herself, as a wife. Yes, these are the very words she uses to describe her life. They meet, they marry. We don’t know why. Then he, almost immediately oblivious, and she, almost immediately unhappy, are off to Rumania. Some sources give her year of birth as 1911, possibly due to Manning's well-known obfuscations of her age. The Braybrooke and Braybrooke biography and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography both give the 1908 date. Braybrooke & Braybrooke 2004, p.1 Piette, Adam (2004), Marcus, Peter; Nicholls (eds.), The Cambridge history of twentieth-century English literature, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp.431–32, ISBN 0-521-82077-4, OCLC 186361607