Few writers have had the value of their major work accepted so readily, and yet the value of their life's achievement treated so skeptically, as the poet and fabulist Frederic Manning. Fewer still Australian writers have enjoyed more long-lasting attempts by the country of their birth to claim them when only the barest of traces of that country survive in their actual writings. Manning's most enduring work, The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme and Ancre, 1916 (1929), is often said to be the finest work of fiction to emerge from World War I, and while his collection of short historical works, Scenes and Portraits (1909), is also accorded respect, the remainder of his work, including two books of poems and a verse epic, is found to be of little merit even as "Edwardian" writing. The key to such divergent readings--and to Manning's originality as an Australian writer--lies in his talent for...