Bloomsbury Academic Early Larkin

"Astute."Times Literary SupplementBeginning in the late 1930s, this is the first book-length critical study of Larkin’s early work: his poetry, novels, short fictions, essays, and letters. The book tells the story of Philip Larkin’s early literary development, starting with Larkin’s earliest literary efforts and his remarkable correspondence with Jim Sutton, and ending at the point Larkin’s 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 Larkin’s development. Critics have presented Larkin’s early career as a false start which he overcame by swapping Yeats’s influence for Hardy’s. Having re-discovered Hardy’s poetry in 1946, the story goes, Larkin realised the potential of writing about his own life, and disavowed Yeats.Central to this book’s 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 Coleman’s 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 Larkin’s mature verse, Early Larkin proposes that the writer’s breakthrough was a result of his burgeoning ‘interest in everything outside himself’ – itself the consequence of his curious experiment with Brunette Coleman. Review Underwood is an astute reader … He makes a strong case that Larkin’s early work represents a series of attempts to develop an “interest in everything outside himself”, to play with personae and to disturb the conventions of various genres. --Times Literary SupplementUnderwood’s searching analysis of Larkin’s early career brilliantly illuminates the complex formative writings of the 1940s and 1950s. Reading Early Larkin, we come to understand and appreciate later Larkin all the more. --Stephen Regan, Professor of English, Durham University, UKEarly Larkin is among the most perceptive, eloquent and ground-breaking books of poetry criticism I have ever read. Underwood shows us just how crucial Larkin’s lesbian heteronym Brunette Coleman ― dismissed by earlier critics as a joke ― was to his evolution as a poet of otherness and empathy. This book fulfils the promise of the very best literary criticism: not only does it change the way we read and understand Larkin’s work, it prompts us to reconsider our current approaches to poetics altogether. --Heather Clark, Professor of Contemporary Poetry, University of Huddersfield, UK About the Author James Underwood is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Deputy Director of the Ted Hughes Network at the University of Huddersfield, UK. His research interests are in twentieth-century poetry, literary correspondence, and literary (auto)biography. His work has been published in journals and books including English, Yearbook of English Studies, British Literature in Transition 1980–2000, and A Companion to Literary Biography.