The British novelist Olivia Manning, one of a group of expatriate writers living as refugees in Cairo during the Second World War, achieved wider fame towards the end of the last century when the six novels of her Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy were adapted for television by British broadcaster the BBC under the title the Fortunes of War.

Viewers in the UK and throughout the world became familiar with the wartime experiences of Manning’s main characters Guy and Harriet Pringle, who had fled Romania in 1940 as a result of the German takeover of the country and had ended up alone and nearly destitute in Cairo.

The character of Guy was based on Manning’s husband, a lecturer at the University of Bucharest until the events of 1940. Harriet was based on Manning herself, and it is through Harriet’s eyes that most of the events of the novels are seen. The BBC adaptation, made in the late 1980s, gave new life to both by casting British actors Kenneth Branagh as Guy and Emma Thompson as Harriet.

Manning not only produced probably the most ambitious novelistic treatment of expatriate life in Cairo during the Second World War but also did so largely from a woman’s point of view. Her Levant Trilogy is not only the single most ambitious fictional treatment of the period in English, but also a major example of writing by women about the Second World War.

However, although the BBC adaptation of her novels made her famous, and there has been growing academic and other interest in her writing in recent years, Manning herself did not live to see either. She died in London in 1980 having completed the last novel in the Trilogy only a few months beforehand and convinced that her novels had not received the recognition that was their due.

She thought that her early writing had not been encouraged by her male peers in the community of expatriate writers in Cairo as well as by the still largely masculine literary establishment elsewhere. While she never supposed that writing by women was of interest just because it was by women – she was never a literary feminist – her career may point intriguingly to gender factors at work.

Born in 1908 into a provincial middle-class family, Manning had to fight to have her ambitions to become a writer, or if not a writer an artist, taken seriously in a milieu in which young women were supposed to aim at marketable skills, perhaps a secretarial career, with a view to making an appropriate marriage.  

It must have taken some determination on Manning’s part to combine her secretarial studies with art school evening classes while at the same time sending off short stories and even novels to publishers in the hope of abandoning typing in favour of a literary or artistic career. Eventually by dint of writing late into the evenings and what seems to have been a kind of indomitable self-belief she saw a novel published.

Enjoying the exposure this gave her, she began the conquest of the outer fringes of literary life, eventually meeting, and then marrying, R.G. Smith, a British Council lecturer in Romania. The couple left for Bucharest in September 1939, arriving on the same day that Britain declared war on Germany in one of the early moves of the Second World War.

Manning had never left England before, but on arriving in Romania during the final months of that country’s pre-war independence, she found the subject-matter for her writing. First there was her Balkan Trilogy drawing on her life in Eastern Europe on the eve of war, and then there was her Levant Trilogy, taking the story on to her experiences in Cairo, where Manning and Smith arrived in April 1941, having been evacuated from Greece with other British residents.

But before either of these there was the difficult question of what to do in Egypt, a country that neither Smith nor Manning had visited before. “For weeks we lived in a state of recoil” from the unfamiliar surroundings, Manning wrote, with the situation only stabilising when the couple moved from Alexandria to Cairo where Smith discovered a coterie of like-minded male friends even as Manning remained largely stranded.

Later she found work at the US Embassy in Cairo and began to reflect on her new situation in literary pieces submitted to magazines. There was a large British community in Cairo at the time, mostly military and engaged in fighting against the German and Italian forces that were advancing across neighbouring Libya. But there were also many civilians who had found in Egypt a welcome haven from the War.

Some of these civilians had literary ambitions, and for a time Cairo was home to several English-language literary magazines. These hosted work by writers who later became famous after the War, among them Lawrence Durrell, author of the Alexandria Quartet of novels, and P.H. Newby, author of Picnic at Saqqara, a 1955 novel that established the Anglo-Egyptian novel as a comic form.

 

Levant Trilogy: The three novels of Manning’s Levant Trilogy, set in Cairo during the Second World War and drawing on her experience as a refugee, were published between 1977 and 1980 as The Danger Tree (1977), The Battle Lost and Won (1978), and The Sum of Things (1980).

The first novel in the series establishes the method, with Manning interleaving chapters recounting Harriet and Guy’s attempts at setting themselves up in wartime Cairo with others giving something of the larger context through a parallel plot set in the British army. Perhaps inevitably, Manning’s Cairo chapters are the more successful, drawing on her own experiences and containing sketches of acquaintances and friends.

Many readers will be fascinated by her records of British expatriate life in Cairo during the war, with its subtle and not-so-subtle social hierarchies, veiled and not-so-veiled feuds, and concealed or not-so-concealed anxieties about loss of status, loss of money, and possibly also at least potentially loss of life. While most of Manning’s characters go to great lengths to keep up appearances, even in the unpromising circumstances of the Second World War, there is little they can do to reverse the sense that the times are against them.

There is always a gnawing worry about what might happen next. Personal plans are put on hold while enormous armies slog it out elsewhere, in the Egyptian case until the battle of Al-Alamein, which saw German and Italian forces defeated west of Alexandria in 1942, uncomfortably close to home.

Life becomes crabbed, in some cases desperate, as character after character, abandoning hopes of settling down to a career, becomes preoccupied with finding some sort of employment, renting a few rooms in a furnished flat or lodging house, even cadging a drink from someone who may temporarily be slightly better off at a local club.

To make things worse, in the first two novels there is the possibility that Harriet, Guy, and the rest of the British community may have to flee if German troops enter Alexandria. A new arrival in the country after her evacuation from Greece, Harriet is forced to confront the fact that she and her compatriots are not welcome in Egypt or the other Middle Eastern countries under British occupation, something that apparently had not occurred to her before.

“The train had drawn into the Cairo station at midnight,” Harriet remembers, “and those who had money in Egypt found themselves taxis and went to hotels. The rest, having nothing but useless drachma, waited about, bemused, not knowing where to go or what to do.” Within a few weeks, Guy has found a job teaching English. Harriet, finding it more difficult to access an expatriate labour market largely monopolised by men, has to wait. Other refugees, not seeing any possibility of making a go of life in Egypt, look for exits from the situation.

“Most of the refugees had no wish to stay in Egypt. Most of them went to Palestine and from there to managed to make their way to India, Persia, or South Africa,” the narrator comments. “Some, it was rumoured, even managed to get back to England. Those who could not afford to travel on their own began to talk about a possible official evacuation.”

Meanwhile, Harriet, brought up to believe “the British the most fortunate of people,” is shocked to discover that “to the Americans she was an alien who rated less than a quarter of the salary paid to an American-born typist.” The American staff, protected by the fact that the US was not yet a party to the War, “had diplomatic protection and could leave, if they had to leave, in their own time.”

Harriet’s thoughts turn to the possible consequences of events and to sometimes bitter reflections on life in Egypt, in pre-War days for some a place of leisure but for her a grim retreat still threatened by homelessness. “Supposing the entire [British] 8th Army was caught between the converging pincers” of the German advance “and not one man remained to retreat and defend what was left? What would they do then? There was almost relief at the thought of it. Responsibility would cease. They would not have to run away again.”

Looking in the window of a travel agency, “she saw, dusty and crackling with the heat, the posters that used to draw the rich to Egypt: the face of the Sphinx, the lotus columns of Karnak, the beautiful and tranquil Nile.” As if to underline the gap between this enchanted world preserved behind the deserted travel agency’s window and that lived in by Harriet and Guy, Manning adds for good measure that “at that moment a familiar sensation came to her, and she knew she was in for another attack” of diarrhoea.

The first two novels of the Levant Trilogy are set in locations that many will recognise – from the Garden City apartment where Harriet watches British Embassy staff burning papers before the German advance on Alexandria to Suleiman Pasha Street in Downtown Cairo, where she catches a glimpse of British General Claude Auchinleck on the last day of his Middle East command.

There are gatherings in Groppi’s Garden in Adly Street and at the Anglo-Egyptian Union in Zamalek, a visit to Saqqara to see the archaeological remains, and to the Muski to buy home furnishings.

People take taxis, in those days horse-drawn gharries, and are dropped at Shepherd’s Hotel, still at its old location off Opera Square before it was burned to the ground in 1952. British academic Lord Pinkrose, one of Manning’s most memorable creations, is shot to death in a case of mistaken identity while attempting to give a lecture on Byron at the Cairo Opera House in volume two.

 

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* A version of this article appears in print in the 25 July, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly