Early Larkin

(Hardback)

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"Astute." Times Literary Supplement Beginning in the late 1930s, this is the first book-length critical study of Larkins early work: his poetry, novels, short fictions, essays, and letters. The book tells the story of Philip Larkins early literary development, starting with Larkins earliest literary efforts and his remarkable correspondence with Jim Sutton, and ending at the point Larkins 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 Larkins development. Critics have presented Larkins early career as a false start which he overcame by swapping Yeatss influence for Hardys. Having re-discovered Hardys poetry in 1946, the story goes, Larkin realised the potential of writing about his own life, and disavowed Yeats. Central to this books 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 Colemans 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 Larkins mature verse, Early Larkin proposes that the writers breakthrough was a result of his burgeoning interest in everything outside himself itself the consequence of his curious experiment with Brunette Coleman.

Reviews

Underwood is an astute reader He makes a strong case that Larkins 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 Supplement *
Underwoods searching analysis of Larkins 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, UK *
Early Larkin is among the most perceptive, eloquent and ground-breaking books of poetry criticism I have ever read. Underwood shows us just how crucial Larkins 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 Larkins work, it prompts us to reconsider our current approaches to poetics altogether. * Heather Clark, Professor of Contemporary Poetry, University of Huddersfield, UK *

Author Bio

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 19802000, and A Companion to Literary Biography.