Brunette Coleman: What Larkin Read

The appearance in 2002 of Philip Larkin’s Brunette Coleman texts (two novellas, an autobiographical fragment, a polemical essay and some poems, written in 1943) prompted a good deal of mockery and, even amongst Larkin’s admirers, embarrassed perplexity. Since then, Larkin scholarship has had time to assimilate Larkin’s youthful extravagances, arguing that these strange productions are attempts at psychological resolution, and that strands of continuity can be traced between Larkin’s Brunette and his later work. Nevertheless, more than twenty years on, Larkin’s heteronymically lesbian extravagances still look eccentric, not to say risible. This essay approaches the Brunette Coleman enterprise from a new angle, arguing that it represents a significant attempt by the ambitious young novelist to integrate fictional strategies he had encountered in other writers into his own ludic experiment.