“I don’t want fame when I am dead,” Olivia Manning once complained. “I want it now.” Manning, the British novelist who died in 1980, carried grudges: never made the Booker shortlist, never got a “solo review” in the Sunday papers, always passed over for Iris Murdoch. Manning’s best-known work, her “Balkan” trilogy inspired by her experience in Romania and Greece during World War II, was reissued by the NYRB in 2010 with a praiseful introduction by Rachel Cusk, but Manning would have wondered what took so long.

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“Manning’s ‘people’ are more than literary characters: they have the feeling of real beings who happen to find themselves in the narrative frame, like passersby caught on camera,” wrote Cusk. “Indeed, The Balkan Trilogy is frequently so faithful to the sense of lived life that it is often difficult to discern the hand that is shaping it.” You can understand the appeal of Manning’s fiction to Cusk in particular. About the same time that Cusk wrote this introduction, she was sued by some of her “people,” a family who recognized themselves in her memoir The Last Supper.

Not noted in Cusk’s introduction to Manning’s Balkan Trilogy is that Manning also got in libel trouble over those same novels. One of the terrible things about such an action is how it can compromise the work. “The American edition got lawyered to death,” said Cusk of The Last Supper. “It’s a slightly butchered corpse, that one.”

What may be worse than having one’s book butchered by lawyers is having the butchering done incorrectly, as happened to Manning. The inconsistent censorship of Manning’s Balkan trilogy introduced an error into one of the novels that, for 60 years, appears to have gone unnoticed. If it had been noticed, Manning would have complained about it.

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Manning’s three Balkan novels are her most acclaimed, though one contemporary reader told her that in a semi-autobiographical novel “it is just so easy to put down what happened.”

But Manning always pulled from life. A prim, petty matron in her 1951 School for Love was inspired by Robert Graves’s sister Clarissa, but where Clarissa was tall, Manning made her character short. Clarissa nonetheless noticed and considered a lawsuit. Manning’s friend, the poet Steve Smith, wrote a “bitchy review” of Manning’s The Doves of Venus, after finding a character much like herself in its pages: neurotic, and terrified of the dentist. This despite Manning changing Smith’s height.

Manning’s husband, Reggie Smith (no relation to Stevie), once cautioned: “You may be able to pull the wool over the eyes of the Sunday Times readers, but there will always be those who know the truth.”

In 1967, Manning finally heard from somebody’s lawyers. “An awful thing has happened to me,” she wrote to her friend. In the first two books of her Balkan Trilogy, The Great Fortune (1960) and The Spoilt City (1962), Manning had referred to the 1939 assassination of Armand Cǎlinescu, the Romanian prime minister, by Romania’s fascist Iron Guard. Manning and her husband were in Romania when it had happened. Drawing as she often did from real life, Manning described Cǎlinescu’s death, and how, a year later, each member of his surviving family were “taken to the nearest large town and shot in the marketplace.” The original assassination was implied to have been done for the benefit, or with the participation, of Romania’s King Carol: “You never heard that the King said… ‘I’ll get that bastard Cǎlinescu if it’s the last thing I ever do’?”

But in fact Cǎlinescu’s family had not been shot in the streets, and his son, Barbu Cǎlinecsu was living and working in Cambridge, as an architect. The younger Cǎlinecsu was “libelled and deeply damaged by things said about his family and father” in Manning’s novel. For one thing, the claim that King Carol supported his father’s assassination was baseless. But his biggest concern, as it was told to Manning’s publishers, Heinemann and Panther, that if its description of events were to be taken by a reader on good faith, they would conclude that Barbu Cǎlinescu was murdered in Romania after his father, and therefore that the Cambridge architect with the same name was “a liar and imposter.” Barbu Cǎlinescu sought not just damages but to have the two novels withdrawn from print and for Manning and her publishers to publicly apologize.

“I feel pretty sick when I think of it,” Manning wrote to a friend.

Manning’s error was in fact an error, not a deliberate fiction. But the threat still worried her, and her publishers. “The law of libel is so confusing that everyone says something different,” she wrote. “Even the solicitors seem vague about it. That is the worst of it—a British jury is liable to do anything.”

“What a good thing you are insured against libel,” Manning said to the managing director at Heinemann’s.

“Yes,” he replied, “but you are not.”

The kind of claim brought by Barbu Cǎlinescu was not uncommon—but in centuries past, when the form of the novel was not so well-defined in the culture. A literary critic might have been able to marshal a sophisticated defence against Cǎlinescu’s argument. Why should a reader assume that what they read in a novel, as opposed to a memoir or a work of history, was true, or take the novelist’s word for it over the evidence of their eyes and ears? Yes, Manning’s novel was semi-autobiographical, but it had given fictional names to the characters based on real people, which included her and her husband. Might that not signify to a reader that the whole novel was, in a sense, untrue? Catherine Gallagher, in her 2006 essay “The Rise of Fictionality,” identified a reader’s ability to apprehend a realistic, plausible story—like those written by Manning—as fiction to be a sign of “fictional sophistication in a culture.”

If she ever paid attention to how her books had been censored she never said much about it. The real effect of the episode was to put her on high alert of being sued again.

But few readers of fiction have had the experience of a novel identifying them, personally, as having been dead for 20 years, and so perhaps we cannot understand the impacts. Even Manning, in her private correspondence, referred to Barbu Cǎlinescu as the man “claiming to be the son of the assassinated prime minister.” Her instinct was to trust her own novel.

Manning’s publishers settled the case. Cǎlinescu accepted an apology, amendments to the books, and reimbursement for his costs. As to those, Manning fought her publisher Heinemann. “The firm did not commit the libel,” Heinemann told her. Manning argued that if one was going to publish a writer who draws their material from life, things like this were bound to happen. She threatened to leave the publisher if they forced her to pay, and the matter was “quietly forgotten.”

The Spoilt City was recalled and amended, with all references to an execution of Armand Cǎlinescu’s family expunged. Panther, who published Manning in paperback, initially mishandled the amendments, leaving a plural reference to “the slaughtered Cǎlinescus” intact. It was corrected in a later edition.

Gone too were the suggestions that King Carol had wanted his prime minister dead, which was principally expressed in a line of dialogue in The Great Fortune. The character Galpin says to the character Yakimov, “You never heard that the King said to Udureanu: ‘I’ll get that bastard Cǎlinescu if it’s the last thing I ever do’?” This was removed.

But a reference later in the book to that line of dialogue was not. In another conversation between Galpin and Yakimov about King Carol, Yakimov asks says, “You said he said he’d get Cǎlinescu.” But Galpin hadn’t said, not in any edition of the book published since 1967. A reader might conclude that the line refers to a conversation these characters have had off the page. Instead, it’s a clue, the only indication that the book is not the original text.

What’s confusing about the retention of this line is that it seems to imply Carol’s complicity in the assassination just as much as the expurgated dialogue did. It has remained in the book to this day, untouched and—probably by the Cǎlinescu family, at least—unnoticed.

Manning wrote all of this off as “a sad business.” If she ever paid attention to how her books had been censored she never said much about it. The real effect of the episode was to put her on high alert of being sued again.

The character of Yakimov, a comic, amoral scrounger whom Rachel Cusk described as Manning’s “masterpiece,” was like many of Manning’s characters inspired by a real person. So pathetic was the portrait, though, that Manning made especial effort to disguise her inspiration. After the Cǎlinescu case, a woman approached Manning at a party to say that she was “greatly amused” by her books because she were acquainted with the source material for Yakimov. Manning said she was mistaken. Then the woman named the person: the British writer Derek Patmore.

“I begged her on no account ever to mention the books to him and she promised, very sweetly, to keep the whole thing dark but the incident made me feel so ill I had to leave the party,” Manning described it.

Patmore, like everyone else in this story, is long dead. If Patmore were alive, he’d have bigger problems than Manning: One of the five sentences in Patmore’s Wikipedia biography is a piece of thirdhand gossip alleging that he was a pederast.

If Manning learned anything from the Cǎlinescu case, it was to make sure that the people she was writing about were really dead. In Cairo, during the Second World War, Manning had witnessed an eight-year-old boy killed by a mortar shell, and the boy’s parents, in denial, attempting to revive the child by feeding him gruel through the hole in his cheek. Three decades later, Manning put it in a book. The author Penelope Lively called this “one of the most insensitive translations of experience into fiction.”

By publication, both the child’s parents were deceased. The family’s solicitors nonetheless wrote to Manning, demanding that the scene and the characters in it be removed from the novel and all future works. This time Manning stood her ground. Manning wrote back defending her creation, Angela Hooper, as bearing no resemblance at all to Amy Smart, the mother of that eight-year-old child. Manning explicated the differences: nationality, race, temperament. The most obvious difference, which Manning left unsaid, was that in the novel Angela Hooper goes on to be great friends with the character based on Olivia Manning. In life, Amy Smart invited Olivia Manning to one dinner party; she was then barred from the house due to what one biographer has called a “carping and vindictive personality.”

A mutual acquaintance of both women once said to Manning, “I should think you must be one of the happiest of women.”

“Why?”

“Because you do most successfully that which you set out to do.”

“And what is that?”

“Be as unpleasant as possible to as many people as possible.”

Manning, I think, would have thought that that is part of being a novelist. And she would not necessarily be wrong, nor alone. “At this point, I feel it’s a form of social embarrassment how everything I do turns up in my next book,” said Rachel Cusk in 2010. “I used to worry about that sort of thing all the time, and now I don’t. I’m completely shameless.”

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This article refers to the two published biographies of Olivia Manning, Olivia Manning: A Life, by Neville Braybrooke and June Braybrooke (Chatto & Windus 2004), and Olivia Manning: A Woman at War, by Deirdre David (Oxford University Press 2012), and previously unpublished material from Manning’s papers, held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.