Jill

Blurb

Jill is a novel by English writer Philip Larkin, first published in 1946 by The Fortune Press, and reprinted by Faber and Faber in 1964. It was written between 1943 and 1944, when Larkin was twenty-one years old and an undergraduate at St John's College, Oxford.
The novel is set in wartime Oxford, the city in which it was written. Protagonist John Kemp is a young man from "Huddlesford" in Lancashire, who goes up to Oxford. With great sympathy it analyses his emotions at this first experience of privileged southern life. Socially awkward and inexperienced, Kemp is attracted by the reckless and dissipated life of his roommate Christopher Warner, a well-off southerner who has attended a minor public school, tellingly called "Lamprey College". The eponymous Jill is Kemp's imaginary sister, whom he invents to confound Warner. Kemp then discovers a real-life Jill called Gillian, the 15-year-old cousin of Warner's friend Elizabeth. Kemp becomes infatuated with Gillian, but his advances are thwarted by Elizabeth and rebuffed by Gillian.
Larkin writes of his own experiences of Oxford during the war in the Introduction he added for the republication by Faber and Faber in 1964: