Frederic Manning

Born in Sydney in 1882, Frederic Manning was an Australian poet and novelist who spent much of his adult life in England. A lifelong asthmatic, he was educated largely outside formal schooling, and early on he moved in literary circles connected with figures such as Arthur Galton. Before the war he published poetry and prose, quietly building the style that would later make his fiction stand out.

When the First World War began, Manning enlisted and served on the Western Front, including at the Somme. Those experiences shaped the book for which he is now best known, The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929), first published anonymously and later issued in a shorter version as Her Privates We. The novel became admired for its plainspoken realism, its attention to ordinary soldiers, and its refusal to turn war into something noble or tidy.

Manning died in London in 1935. Though he was never a prolific writer, his reputation has lasted because his best work captures both the rough talk of army life and the inner strain of men trying to endure it.