Olivia Manning (1908–1980) was born in Portsmouth, England, and spent much of her childhood in Northern Ireland. Her father, Oliver, was a penniless British sailor who rose to become a naval commander, and her mother, Olivia, had a prosperous Anglo-Irish background. Manning trained as a painter at the Portsmouth School of Art, then moved to London and turned to writing. She published her first novel under her own name in 1938 (she had published several potboilers in a local paper under the name Jacob Morrow while a teenager). The next year she married R.D. "Reggie" Smith, and the couple moved to Romania, where Smith was employed by the British Council. During World War II , the couple fled before the Nazi advance, first to Greece and then to Jerusalem, where they lived until the end of the war. Manning wrote several novels during the 1950s, but her first real success as a novelist was The Great Fortune (1960), the first of six books concerning Guy and Harriet Pringle, whose wartime experiences and troubled marriage echoed that of the diffident Manning and her gregarious husband. In the 1980s these novels were collected in two volumes, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, known collectively as Fortunes of War. In addition to her novels, Manning wrote essays and criticism, history, a screenplay, and a book about Burmese and Siamese cats. She was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1976, and died four years later. »

Jane Smiley is the author of many novels, including Good Faith, Horse Heaven, and A Thousand Acres, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. Her most recent work is Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. »

School for Love

By Olivia Manning
Introduction by Jane Smiley

Jerusalem in 1945 is a city in flux: refugees from the war in Europe fill its streets and cafés, the British colonial mandate is coming to an end, and tensions are on the rise between the Arab and Jewish populations. Felix Latimer, a recently orphaned teenager, arrives in Jerusalem from Baghdad, biding time until he can secure passage to England. Adrift and deeply lonely, Felix has no choice but to room in a boardinghouse run by Miss Bohun, a relative he has never met. Miss Bohun is a holy terror, a cheerless miser who proclaims the ideals of a fundamentalist group known as the Ever-Readies—joy, charity, and love—even as she makes life a misery for her boarders. Then Mrs. Ellis, a fascinating young widow, moves into the house and disrupts its dreary routine for good.

Olivia Manning's great subject is the lives of ordinary people caught up in history. Here, as in her panoramic depiction of World War II, The Balkan Trilogy, she offers a rich and psychologically nuanced story of life on the precipice, and she tells it with equal parts compassion, skepticism, and humor.

Reviews

How, in just a few pages, does a writer earn our trust, and her characters our allegiance? Olivia Manning's work has been out of sight for decades, but her newly reissued School for Love is about to charm and startle a whole new generation of readers.
— O, The Oprah Magazine

A subtle and touching novel.... The feelings of a sensitive and warmhearted boy, as well as his occasional sillinesses, are captured by Manning with great sympathy and without sentimentality.
— A Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel

The intensity of Miss Manning’s brilliantly perceptive writing is controlled by a serene style.
— New York Times

She has been compared with Graham Greene and Anthony Powell. Anthony Burgess, who thinks the two trilogies may prove to be ‘the finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer,’ finds in her a kinship with Tolstoy.
— The Los Angeles Times

She produced elegant, incisive, psychologically penetrating novels which conveyed a real sense of contemporary history.
— The Financial Times

A triumph of portraiture, compassionate, witty and assured.
— Time and Tide

The most satisfying of [Manning's] books.
— Times Literary Supplement

Also see:

Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy
By Olivia Manning
Introduction by Rachel Cusk

A multi-stranded and engrossing novel of civilian life during World War II. "One of those combinations of soap opera and literature that are so rare you'd think it would meet the conditions of two kinds of audiences: those after what the trade calls 'a good read,' and those who want something more." —Howard Moss, The New York Review of Books

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Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.00
Price: $11.20 (20% off)


Feb 3, 2009
208 pages
ISBN: 1590173031
9781590173039
Literature in English
NYRB Classics

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