concern for the realities of most refugees, who are portrayed as "a degraded and demoralised Other", challenging complacent Western notions of stability and nationality. Manning has been classified as an Orientalist writer, whose depictions of cultures frequently emphasise exoticism and alien landscape. This feature has been most closely examined in her novels set in Romania. In these, scholars note Manning's positioning of Romania as an exotic "Other", a legacy of the Ottoman Empire located at the limits of civilised Europe and on the frontier with the uncivilised Orient. Her negative perceptions of Romanian "Otherness" include a childlike population living decadent lives, passive and immoral women, corruption, and a wild, untamed environment. These are contrasted with more positive reactions to Greece and Western Europe as the centre of civilising and orderly life in other books. In keeping with colonial construction of exoticism in Western literature, "otherness" is increasingly domesticated as characters recognise, with greater exposure to the country, links to Western culture. Her depiction of Romania led to Fortunes of War being restricted as seditious writing under Romania's Communist government. Gender and feminism Manning's books are not easily classified as a part of the feminist canon. Manning supported the rights of women, particularly equal literary fees, but had no sympathy for the women's movement, writing that "[t]hey make such an exhibition of themselves. None can be said to be beauties. Most have faces like porridge." In Manning's books, the word "feminine" is used in a derogatory sense, and tends to be associated with female complacency, foolishness, artifice and deviousness, and fulfilment for women comes in fairly conventional roles of wife, mother and the private domain. Elizabeth Bowen remarked that Manning had "an almost masculine outfit in the way of experience" that influenced her writing about women and the war. Manning viewed herself not as a female writer, but as a writer who happened to be a woman, and early in her career she obscured her gender using a pseudonym and initials. Manning found it easier to create male characters, and in general her novels tend to minimise differences in gender, writing about people rather than women in particular. Harriet Pringle, for example, moves through processes of self-discovery and empowerment as an individual rather than in feminist solidarity with her sex. In Manning's The Doves of Venus (1960), based on Manning's friendship with Stevie Smith, female characters display "the 1950s anger more