Early Larkin

"Astute." Times Literary Supplement Beginning in the late 1930s, this is the first book-length critical study of Larkins early work: his poetry, novels, short fictions, essays, and letters. The book tells the story of Philip Larkins early literary development, starting with Larkins earliest literary efforts and his remarkable correspondence with Jim Sutton, and ending at the point Larkins maturity begins, with the writing of his first great poems. In providing a comprehensive and systematic study of this part of Larkin's life, this book also presents a new and surprising narrative of Larkins development. Critics have presented Larkins early career as a false start which he overcame by swapping Yeatss influence for Hardys. Having re-discovered Hardys poetry in 1946, the story goes, Larkin realised the potential of writing about his own life, and disavowed Yeats. Central to this books controversial counter-narrative is an insistence on the significance of Brunette Coleman, the female heteronym Larkin invented in 1943. Three years before his re-discovery of Hardy, Larkin wrote a strange and unique series of works for schoolgirls under Colemans name. These writings not only led him away from Yeats and other hindering influences, but also away from himself. Whereas the Yeats-to-Hardy narrative emphasises the autobiographical qualities of Larkins mature verse, Early Larkin proposes that the writers breakthrough was a result of his burgeoning interest in everything outside himself itself the consequence of his curious experiment with Brunette Coleman.