Eve Patten

Olivia Manning's reputation as a difficult personality often threatens to obscure her reputation as a writer. Few twentieth century novelists can have inspired such consistent dislike. The publisher Dan Davin, for example, who was devoted to Manning's gregarious husband Reggie Smith, complained of her as a shrewish woman whose aim was to be as unpleasant to as many people as possible, while the legendary denizen of Fitzrovia, Julian Maclaren-Ross, recalled among his Stag's Head drinking circle the taciturn, undemonstrative and physically unattractive Olivia Manning who, from the vantage point of her bar-stool regarded the others with an expression of amusement, mingled with contempt. Fellow writer Inez Holden christened her "whiney" Manning; Anthony Powell, her otherwise generous editor at Punch, admitted her to be the world's worst grumbler and her publishers at Heinemann were forced to conclude that she was never an easy artist to handle. Even Kay Dick, her lifelong friend and correspondent, depicted Manning in her 1984 novel The Shelf as the spiteful gossip Sophie, who, with her wry fragility, delicate hands and penetrating voice . . . often reminded me of a goshawk about to bite.

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