Jill

Front Cover
Harry N. Abrams, May 10, 1976 - Fiction - 247 pages
The novel is set in wartime Oxford, the city 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.

Other editions - View all

About the author (1976)

Philip Larkin was a British poet, novelist, critic, and essayist. Born in 1922 in Coventry, England, he graduated from St. John's College, Oxford, in 1940 and then pursued a career as a librarian, becoming the librarian at the University of Hull in 1955. Although he led a retiring life and published infrequently, producing only one volume of poetry approximately every 10 years, Larkin was still considered one of the preeminent contemporary British poets. He is often associated with the "Movement," a 1950s literary group that, through the use of colloquial language and common, everyday subjects, endeavored to create poetry that would appeal to the common reader. However, this association came about mainly because Larkin's poem "Church Going," for which he first gained critical attention, was published in New Lines, an anthology of the "Movement" poets. In reality, his work, particularly his later poems, is not typical of the group. Larkin's published a total of only four volumes of poetry: The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964), and High Windows (1974). He also wrote two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, and published two volumes of prose, Required Writing and All That Jazz, a collection of his reviews of jazz records. Philip Larkin died in 1985.

Bibliographic information