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Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

by Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite - £12.99  Faber and Faber (2011)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9780571239108 | ISBN 10: 0571239102

Philip Larkin met Monica Jones at University College, Leicester, in Autumn 1946, when they were both twenty-four; he was the newly appointed assistant librarian and she was an English lecturer. In 1950 Larkin moved to Belfast, and thence to Hull, while Monica remained in Leicester, becoming by turns his correspondent, lover and closest confidante, a relationship which lasted over forty years until the poet’s death in 1985.
 
This remarkable unpublished correspondence only came to light after Monica Jones’s death in 2001, and consists of nearly two thousand letters, postcards and telegrams, which chronicle - day by day, sometimes hour by hour - every aspect of Larkin’s life and the convolutions of their relationship. The letters deal extensively with other writers, living and dead (D. H. Lawrence, Hardy, Katherine Mansfield, Kipling, Dickens, Kingsley Amis), and with the experiences that shaped Larkin’s poems. Their impressionistic immediacy - liberally sprinkled with Larkin’s cartoons - and their relaxed privacy offer a view of the poet’s personality and its resources which was often screened from his other epistolary relationships, already familiar to readers of Anthony Thwaite’s edition of the Selected Letters (1992).
 
The collection was acquired by the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 2004, and the present selection is made possible through a collaboration between Faber and Faber and the Bodleian Library.
 
Letters to Monica offers a richly characteristic selection from Larkin’s side of the correspondence, and one which tells both sides of their story.

(Price & availability last checked: June 2019)

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