Olivia, Reggie (her husband), Jerry Slattery (their doctor and her lover), and Johnny (Jerry’s wife): I first heard about this jolly eccentric crew from the British politician Michael Foot, who shared a vibrant social life with the novelist and her cohort during the decade when he and his wife Jill Craigie lived in the St. John’s Wood section of London. (I have a biography of Craigie forthcoming.)

I thought Mr. Foot might be exaggerating in his fond and ferociously funny memories of his literary friends. But not a bit. Olivia Manning, author of the “Balkan” and “Levant” trilogies, built her main character, Guy Pringle, on a lifetime’s observation of her husband. At Reggie’s memorial service, Mr. Foot commented that Reggie had been dissected by the “most perceptive eye since Jane Austen.” Then he gazed at his audience and asked, “Which of the rest of us could have survived such scrutiny?”

The gregarious Reggie not only put up with his wife’s scrutiny, he seemed to welcome it. But then Reggie (in his guise as Guy Pringle) “seemed like radium throwing off vitality to the outside world.” Olivia and Reggie remained faithful to each other in a curious, adulterous way. He was a notorious womanizer, but Olivia had Jerry, who apparently electrified every social gathering he entered. Olivia was devastated when Jerry succumbed to a massive heart attack in 1977, three years before she died. But she still had her Reggie.

Manning never quite got her due. Her story constitutes one of those literary mysteries that biographies try to resolve. In part, the relative obscurity can be traced to the fact that her works are of epic size – not exactly the form that appeals to hasty reviewers on deadline.

In life and in her fiction, Manning and her husband, a British council lecturer, stayed just one step ahead of the Nazis – having to escape from Romania to Greece to Egypt and then Jerusalem as the Axis forces advanced across the globe. This world cataclysm and how it impinges on Guy and Harriet Pringle is the theme of Manning’s greatest work.

Manning predicted that a film would one day be made of her masterpiece but that she would not live to see it. And so it was: The BBC broadcast “The Fortunes of War” – the title for the “Balkan Trilogy” – in 1987, seven years after the novelist’s death. It is sad that Manning could not watch Kenneth Branagh’s performance as Guy Pringle, a triumph that the novelist’s friends hailed as uncanny.

Manning’s career shows that literary politics does play its part in furthering or retarding a writer’s reputation. I was disgusted to read why Manning, in one instance, did not receive the literary prize she deserved. One of the judges noted:

Olivia was thought by David [Carver, general secretary of PEN] and less emphatically by my fellow judges to be particularly unlikely to be agreeable company, while even my reluctant fondness for her was tainted by the feeling of certainty that if she won she would insist on bringing Reggie, whom none of us wanted.

What better evidence could there be of the way writers can get shut out? Biography, in this instance, shows why literary criticism and prize-giving can be no more than logrolling.

Reggie was boisterous, a friend to the world. Olivia was paranoid, forever finding fault and accusing her fellow writers of not giving her due. She was a chronic complainer, “the world’s worst grumbler,” Anthony Powell wrote in his diary. She was called Olivia Moaning. She also had a sharp tongue. Lawrence Durrell, whom she hated, called her the “hook-nosed condor of the Middle East.” Her photographs do present a bird-like face. Her friend, the novelist Francis King, called her “Ollie Beak.”

This biography (Chatto & Windus, 320 pages, $34.95) is the work of many hands. Neville and June Braybrooke were Manning’s close friends and worked for more than a decade on this biography. When June died, Neville struggle to overcome his grief and just managed to finish a draft, which Francis King has polished with panache. I know from many conversations with Mr. King that he is a devotee of the short, well-tuned biography, and this is exactly what he delivers. The biography’s tone is affectionate but critical, in keeping with Manning’s own view of the genre: “‘A life,’ as Olivia used to say, ‘means a whole life or nothing.’ She thought biographers should not restrict themselves in any way but tell the truth, however unpalatable to some.”

The Braybrookes have done exactly that – and with a witty and wry touch. Here is a good example of their finesse in a scene involving Anthony Burgess, a friend and staunch supporter of Manning’s fiction:

When his first wife died, Olivia put it about that on the following morning, he had telephoned to propose marriage to her. “But I’m already married,” she protested, according to her story. “Well, get a divorce!” was said to be his reply. From one’s knowledge of Olivia, this may well have been fantasy. From one’s knowledge of Burgess it may well have been true.

This is the first biography of Olivia Manning. There will be others. But later biographers will return to this beautiful, indispensable book and find it a daunting task to surpass its elegant shaping of a writer’s life.