Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions: 1943-1953 - Tapa dura

'I wanted to be "a novelist" in a way I never wanted to be "a poet",' Larkin confided in 1982. It has long been known that his two published novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), tell only part of the story of this thwarted ambition. Drawing on the papers deposited after his death in the Brynmor Jones Library, Hull, this volume collects together virtually all his remaining unpublished fiction. The book opens with works written under the pseudonym 'Brunette Coleman', including the two novellas, 'Trouble at Willow Gables' and 'Michaelmas Term at St Bride's', and the poem sequence 'Sugar and Spice'. The remainder of the volume is devoted to the unfinished drafts of two novels, 'No For An Answer' and 'A New World Symphony', on which Larkin worked after the completion of A Girl in Winter. It ends with two short débats of 1950 and 1951, which pungently dramatise his sense of failure as a novelist and his rejection of marriage. These works offer us two different Larkins: the precocious young writer experimenting with genres, and the 'serious' novelist searching for his voice in a prose medium which ultimately evaded his grasp. 'I tried very hard to write a third novel for about five years', he recollected later. 'The ability to do so had just vanished. I can't say any more than that.'

Philip Larkin was born in Coventry in 1922 and was educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, and St John's College, Oxford. As well as his volumes of poems, which include The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, he wrote two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, and two books of collected journalism: All What Jazz: A Record Library, and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Prose. He worked as a librarian at the University of Hull from 1955 until his death in 1985. He was the best-loved poet of his generation, and the recipient of innumerable honours, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and the WHSmith Award.