Jill (novel)

Jill is a

Faber and Faber (London) in 1964. It was written between 1943 and 1944, when Larkin was twenty-one years old and an undergraduate at St John's College, Oxford

.

Plot

The novel is set in wartime

public school, tellingly called "Lamprey

College". The eponymous Jill is Kemp's imaginary sister, whom he invents to confound Warner. Kemp then discovers a real-life Jill called Gillian, the 15-year-old cousin of Warner's friend Elizabeth. Kemp becomes infatuated with Gillian, but his advances are thwarted by Elizabeth and rebuffed by Gillian.

Larkin writes of his own experiences of Oxford during the war in the Introduction he added for the republication by

Faber and Faber

in 1964:

Life in college was austere. Its pre-war pattern had been dispersed, in some instances permanently ... This was not the Oxford of Michael Fane and his fine bindings, or Charles Ryder and his plovers' eggs. Nevertheless, it had a distinctive quality.

A boy with the surname Bleaney (we are not told his Christian name or indeed anything else about him) makes a fleeting appearance in 'Jill' as one of John Kemp's classmates at Huddlesford Grammar School. Larkin later used this unusual surname in his well-known poem 'Mr Bleaney', although there is nothing to indicate that it refers to the same person.

Larkin's view of the novel

Larkin considered the novel a youthful 'indiscretion' and described the plot as "immature". The first draft was heavily cut by the printer and Larkin later wrote: "I am sick of the Fortune Press. They only publish dirty novels and any printer who does their work is extra suspicious." No manuscript version exists, and Bloomfield, in his 1979 bibliography, says that Larkin destroyed the original typescript. When the book was re-published, Larkin reinstated the censored material.^[1]

Reprints

The book was later published in the USA, first by

ISBN 0-571-22582-9

in 2005.

References

^ ^a ^b "PHILIP LARKIN AND THE CASE OF THE MISSING MANUSCRIPT" by Dr Rebecca Johnson, March 1998, at hull.ac.uk

v t e Philip Larkin
Poetry collections	The North Ship (1945) The Less Deceived (1955) The Whitsun Weddings (1964) High Windows (1974)
Posthumous collections	Collected Poems (1988 and 2003)
Poems	"The Whitsun Weddings" (1964) "An Arundel Tomb" (1964) "Mr Bleaney" (1955) "This Be The Verse" (1974) "Days" (1964) "MCMXIV" (1964) "Aubade" (1977)
Other publications	Jill (1946) A Girl in Winter (1947) The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973) Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985 (1992)
Related	List of poems by Philip Larkin Larkin at Sixty (1982) Philip Larkin Society Larkin 25 Relationships that influenced Philip Larkin Mr Larkin's Awkward Day Brunette Coleman (juvenile pseudonym)

Plot

Larkin's view of the novel

Reprints

References

Further reading