Brunette Coleman

[2] As well as publishing articles and poems in Cherwell and Oxford Poetry, he wrote additional unpublished material that included fragments of semi-autobiographical stories exploring homosexual relationships among groups of undergraduates.

[3] From 1942 the character of much of Larkin's private writing changed, as a result of his friendship with a fellow undergraduate from St John's, Kingsley Amis, who arrived at the university that summer.

It depicts an undergraduate girl's parting from her soldier lover, and ends: "She walked in exaltation through the black streets, her heart glowing like a coal with deep love".

[7] From his general reading, Larkin had acquired a considerable knowledge of girls' school fiction, and had formed definite views on the authors of such works: "stupid women without a grain of humour in their minds", who lacked "erotic sensibility" and treated the lesbian perspective "too casually".

[8] His intention to write in this genre is expressed in a letter to his friend Norman Iles, dated 5 June 1943, just before Larkin sat his degree Finals: "I am spending my time doing an obscene Lesbian novel in the form of a school story".

[9] The novel was Trouble at Willow Gables, a school adventure story in the manner of Dorita Fairlie Bruce or Dorothy Vicary, which Larkin completed at home while awaiting his Finals results.

According to James Booth, who prepared the Coleman texts for publication in 2002, the adoption of a female persona was in line with the pose of "girlish narcissism" that Larkin was affecting in the summer of 1943: "I am dressed in red trousers, shirt and white pullover, and look very beautiful".

He began a sequel to Trouble at Willow Gables, set in a women's college at Oxford and entitled Michaelmas Term at St Bride's, but did not finish it: "All literary inspiration has deserted me", he informed Amis on 13 August.

[14] Nevertheless, a week later he told Amis that Brunette was helping him to write a novel, provisionally entitled Jill, about "a young man who invents an imaginary sister, and falls in love with her".

Back at the school, Miss Holden overlooks the theft in view of Margaret's heroism, although she confiscates the £100 winnings and donates the money to a new swimming pool fund.

In the story the surnames of the headmistress and principal girls have been altered in ink throughout the typescript; some of the original names belonged to Larkin's real-life acquaintances at Oxford.

[8] Some scenes—the savage beating endured by Marie, the lingering descriptions of girls dressing and undressing, Hilary's smouldering sexuality—may, Booth asserts, be written with "the lusts of the male heterosexual gaze" in mind but, he continues, the reader looking for explicit pornography will be disappointed.

[20] Bradford notes three prose styles combining in the narrative: "cautious indifference, archly overwritten symbolism ... and ... its writer's involuntary feelings of sexual excitement".

[21] Motion finds the tone of the prose frivolous on the surface, yet fundamentally cold and cruel: "Once its women have been arraigned for pleasure they are dismissed; once they have been enjoyed they are treated with indifference".

Hilary subsequently avenges Mary's humiliation by seducing de Putron's boyfriend, a gauche Royal Air Force officer called Clive, whom she then dumps unceremoniously.

[26] Cooper argues that as the narrative progresses, Larkin's concerns (in his Coleman voice) move beyond sexual titillation; he is no longer interested in describing lesbian encounters in voyeuristic detail.

[33] Motion describes the Coleman poems as "a world of comfortless jealousies, breathless bike-rides and deathless crushes", mixing elements from writers and poets such as Angela Brazil, Richmal Crompton, John Betjeman and W.H.

[35] Booth finds the poems the most impressive of all the Coleman works, in their evidence of Larkin's early ability to create striking and moving images from conventional school story clichés.

Booth draws specific attention to the elegiac quality of the final lines of "The School in August": "And even swimming groups can fade / Games mistresses turn grey".

The essay is laden with quotations from many writers of the genre, among them Joy Francis, Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Elsie J. Oxenham, Elinor Brent-Dyer and Nancy Breary.

[39] Motion argues that aside from the sometimes facetious tone, the opinions expressed by Larkin in his Coleman persona, particularly the mild xenophobia that enters the essay, foreshadow his own mature prejudices.

His instructions did not cover other writings, therefore the Coleman material remained in the archives of the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, where Larkin had worked as chief librarian since 1955.

[45] Anticipating the publication, Emma Hartley and Vanessa Thorpe in The Observer doubted the literary value of the works, citing Motion's view that the stories were "little more than mild pornography" which the mature poet would never have wished to see published.

Diski mocks Booth's reverential descriptions of the typescripts "as though they were slivers of the True Cross", and concludes: "Let this be a lesson, at least, to anyone who hasn't got around to chucking out the crap they wrote in their teens and early twenties.

The New Statesman's Robert Potts found the stories "entertaining and intriguing for readers familiar with their background and with the genre", and for the most part charmingly innocent, "especially when compared with the reality of boarding-school life".

[48] In a similar vein, Richard Canning in The Independent found the Willow Gables fiction vibrant, well-constructed and entertaining, and praised Larkin's "sly Sapphic spin".

[40] In a more recent analysis Terry Castle, writing in the journal Daedalus, disagrees profoundly with the notion expressed by Adam Kirsch in The Times Literary Supplement, that the publication of the Coleman works was damaging to Larkin's reputation.

On the contrary, argues Castle, "the Brunette phase speaks volumes about the paradoxical process by which Philip Larkin became 'Larkinesque'—modern English poetry's reigning bard of erotic frustration and depressive (if verse-enabling) self-deprecation".

[40] Likewise Stephen Cooper, in his 2004 book Philip Larkin: Subversive Writer, argues that the stylistic and thematic influences of Trouble at Willow Gables and Michaelmas Term at St Brides anticipate the poetry's recurrent concern with rebellion and conformity.

[53] Among examples, Cooper cites Marie's refusal in Willow Gables to compromise with an unjust authority as reflecting the sentiments expressed in Larkin's poem "Places, Loved Ones" (1954).