Lashings of lesbian sex in Larkin's schoolgirl tales
Sunday, 25 June 2000
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The gels are in for a surprise. The head prefects of boarding school fiction, Angela Brazil, Dorita Fairlie Bruce and Enid Blyton, have a challenger in the less-than-innocent shape of Philip Larkin.
The gels are in for a surprise. The head prefects of boarding school fiction, Angela Brazil, Dorita Fairlie Bruce and Enid Blyton, have a challenger in the less-than-innocent shape of Philip Larkin.
The poet, better known for gloomy elegies than dormitory intrigue, was a keen fan of the girls' school genre. Stranger still, he was a devoted practitioner who churned out unpublished novels and poems under the fetching pseudonym Brunette Coleman.
Boarding school fans can get to grips with his unlikely alter ego next year, when works including Trouble at Willow Gables and Michaelmas Term at St Bride's are published for the first time in a specialist collection from Faber and Faber.
They might get more than they bargained for. Larkin goes several steps beyond the breathless intrigue of Mallory Towers and includes liberal quantities of lesbian sex, beatings and bondage - material more in keeping with the photographic collection he was rumoured to maintain.
The anthology will reawaken the controversy caused by the publication of Larkin's letters and the Andrew Motion biography, which portrayed the poet as a man given to misogyny, casual racism and sexual obsession in his private life.
At the time, Motion, one of the executors of the Larkin estate, said: "The flower of art sometimes grows on a long stem out of some very mucky stuff." But the publicity led many to question the appropriateness of such intimate biographical detail.
The book's editor, Dr James Booth, insists the schoolgirl stories are notable for their literary quality, as well as the light they shed on Larkin's development, although he concedes the lesbian content is likely to attract most public interest.
"The material is extraordinarily interesting from a literary point of view," he said. "Trouble at Willow Gables is, for example, to a large extent an authentic girls' school story. It's got a bit of bondage in it, a bit of violence and a bit of sexual titillation. At one point a prefect beats a girl and blackmails her into going to bed with her.
"But they're a minor feature of what's in the book, which is a quite delicate version of the schoolgirl motif. There may be more merit in these pieces than people had realised."
His book, provisionally titled Philip Larkin - Fictions: 1943 to 1953, includes an essay on how to write girls' school stories, six boarding school poems and two fragmentary stories from later in the 1940s.
The works were written in the poet's early twenties, after graduating from Oxford. Booth, a Reader in English at Hull University and secretary of the Larkin Society, believes Larkin wanted to be one of his own heroines and confessed to his friend and correspondent Kingsley Amis that lesbianism had "taken over" part of his personality.
Patricia Craig, biographer, critic and co-author with Patricia Cadogan of You're a Brick, Angela!, a history of girls' school fiction, said: "Authors like Angela Brazil did lay themselves open to that sort of treatment. Her naive enthusiasm is quite hilarious if you read it now. It must have appealed to something in him."
