Anna is a scholar specializing in modern poetry and the intersecting of literature and art. Her doctoral research was on the influence of Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats, and T.S. Eliot on the early work of Ted Hughes and she works as a library assistant and author of the library’s blog at the Brynmor Jones Library at the university of Hull, where Philip Larkin was formerly University librarian for thirty years. Fittingly, for this Ted Hughes Society Book Club podcast, Anna will be talking about Philip Larkin’s first novel Jill.

Jill was written in 1943 and '44, begun when Larkin was still an undergraduate at St. John's College, Oxford reading English. It was first published in 1946 by The Fortune Press, a one-man concern run by Reginald Ashley Caton, which specialised in publishing gay erotica and first collections by notable 20th century poets, including Cecil Day Lewis, Dylan Thomas and Philip Larking. Jill was later reprinted by Faber & Faber in 1964. The novel is set in Oxford during the early years of the Second World War. The protagonist is John Kemp, a young man from a working class community in Lancashire, who goes up to Oxford having never, in his life up till then, been south of Crewe. Kemp who is socially inexperienced, is drawn into the rather dissolute life of his much more self-confident and socially experienced roommate Christopher Warner, an upper-middle class ex-public school boy with a circle of similarly well-heeled and somewhat dissipated friends who Kemp is eager to impress. 

Suggested further reading and listening

Holdhefer, Charles (2006) 'Camping With Larkin' in Philip Larkin and the Poetics of Resistence, edited by Andrew McKeon and Charles Holdhefer. L'Harmattan: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336438398_Camping_with_Larkin

Isherwood, Christopher; Mendelson, Edward; Spender, Stephen (1983) On W. H. Auden, New Books Network: https://newbooksnetwork.com/on-w-h-auden.

Larkin, Philip (2002) Trouble at Willow Gables and other fiction. Faber & Faber.

Larkin, Philip (2005) Jill. Faber & Faber.

Larkin, Philip (2005) A Girl in Winter. Faber & Faber.

Larkin, Philip (1971) 'Dockery and Son' in The Whitsun Weddings. Faber & Faber.

Larkin, Philip (2002) Philip Larkin: Selected Letters, ed. Anthony Thwaite. Faber & Faber.

Sontag, Susan (2018) Notes on Camp. Penguin.

The introductory and closing music is 'Tiger Rag - One Step' by The Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The composition and recording is in the public domain.

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Mark Wormald, the guest for this episode, is Chair of the Ted Hughes Society, a distinguished Hughes scholar and fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he is also founder and curator of the Ted Hughes archive. 

For this podcast, Mark will be talking about a favourite novel: ‘Never Let Me Go’ by the British novelist, Booker Prize Winner and Nobel Laureate, Kazuo Ishiguro.

Kazuo Ishiguro - known to friends and colleagues as ‘Ish’ - was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and moved to Britain with his parents when he was five years old. He was educated at Woking County Grammar School in Surrey, Kent University, and the University of East Anglia where he studied for an MA in Creative Writing with Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury. 

‘Never Let Me Go’ was Ishiguro’s 6th novel, and is set in a parallel England of the late-1990s in which many deadly diseases can be cured through organ transplants from cloned humans, At the centre of the novel is an emotional triad made up of the narrator Cathy and her two closest friends Ruth and Tommy, who are all destined to be first carers and then donors. The novel is both a dystopian bildungsroman and a moral fable in which the three friends gradually learn through childhood, as teenagers and young adults, about their predetermined, foreshortened lives, and the stories they tell themselves in their attempts to cope with what Joseph O’Neill, writing in The Atlantic, described as ‘their hesitant progression into knowledge of their plight - an extreme and heartbreaking version of the exodus of all children from the innocence in which the benevolent but fraudulent adult world conspires to place them’. And as the author Ramsey Campbell wrote ‘it’s a a story that's horrifying, precisely because the narrator [Cathy] doesn't think it is.’

If you wouldlike to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, or would like to join the society and the Ted Hughes Society Book Club, please go to: https://thetedhughessociety.org/

The opening and closing music is from Piano Quartet in A major, D667 'The Trout' by Franz Schubert, performed by George Solchany (piano), Arpad Gerecz (violn), Vilmos Palotal (cello), Thomas Lorand (viola), Jacques Cazauran (double bass). (This recording is in the public domain.)

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