Jill (novel)

"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 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 title refers to the cousin of one of the characters, whom Kemp has a crush on but never manages to speak to.

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.

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
* "" (1983), Faber & Faber, London
* "Collected Poems – 1988 edition (Philip Larkin)" (1988), introd. by Anthony Thwaite, The Marvell Press-Faber & Faber; London-Boston
*"Selected Letters of Philip Larkin," Anthony Thwaite, editor (1992)

Further reading

* "" (1986), ed. by Harry Chambers, Peterloo Poets, Calstock, Great-Britain
*"," Andrew Motion (1993)