Jill is a novel by English writer Philip Larkin, first published in 1946 by The Fortune Press, and reprinted by Faber & 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.
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 goes up to Oxford. With great sympathy it analyses his emotions at this first experience of privileged southern life (he had never been south of Crewe). Socially awkward and inexperienced, Kemp 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". 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 & Faber in 1964:
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.
Jill is currently in print in paperback from Faber & Faber, ISBN 0-571-22582-9.