Jill (novel)
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Jill is a novel by English writer Philip Larkin, first published in 1946 by The Fortune Press, and soon reprinted by Faber & Faber (London). It was written between 1943 and 1944, when Larkin was twenty-one years old and an undergraduate at St. John's College, Oxford.
The novel is set in the wartime Oxford in which it was written. Protagonist John Kemp is a young man from "Huddlesford" in Lancashire, who comes up to Oxford. With great sympathy it analyses his emotions at this first experience of privileged southern life (he has previously never been south of Crewe). Socially awkward and inexperienced, he is attracted by the reckless and dissipated life of his roommate Christopher Warner, a well-off southerner who has attended a minor public school, tellingly called "Lamprey College".
Larkin writes of his own experiences of Oxford during the war in the Introduction he added for the republication by Faber & 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."
Jill is currently in print in paperback from Faber & Faber, ISBN 0-571-22582-9.
[edit] Other works by Philip Larkin
- Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fiction 1943-1953 (writing as "Brunette Coleman")
- A Girl in Winter (1947), Faber & Faber, London
- Philip Larkin: Required Writing (1983), Faber & Faber, London
- Philip Larkin: Collected Poems (1988), introd. by Anthony Thwaite, The Marvell Press-Faber & Faber; London-Boston
- Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, Anthony Thwaite, editor (1992)
[edit] See also
- An Enormous Yes: in memoriam Philip Larkin (1986), ed. by Harry Chambers, Peterloo Poets, Calstock, Great-Britain
- Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, Andrew Motion (1993)
