4
Larkin’s Women
1. Philip Larkin met her in 1946 at Leicester University College. Their lifelong friendship continued until Larkin’s death in December 1985. Who was she?
2. She was Larkin’s closest companion and lover. Between December 1946 and April 1984, Philip Larkin wrote her more than 1,421 letters and 521 postcards; there are about 7,500 surviving pages. Who was she?
3. Match the pairs of lovers
(a) W. B. Yeats 1. Fanny Brawn
(b) John Keats 2. Ruth Bowman
(c) Philip Larkin 3. Robert Browning
(d) Elizabeth Barrett 4. Maud Gonne
4. She was an English novelist whose career was revived when the critic Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin both nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Who was she?
5. Larkin’s poem ‘Wild Oats’ begins, ‘About twenty years ago/Two girls came in where I worked— /A bosomy English rose/And her friend in specs I could talk to.’ Can you identify these girls?
6. Larkin’s poem ‘Latest Face’ was influenced by a lady whom he met at Queen’s University, Belfast, and had a brief affair with. Who was she?
7. Philip Larkin never married. His view of marriage may partly have been coloured by this woman’s warning of its disadvantages. In 1953, she told him, ‘I have just finished reading Love Among the Artists … in which occurs this passage “No: it is marriage that kills the heart and keeps it dead. Better starve the heart than overfeed it.”’ Who was she?
8. In one of his poems, Larkin is ‘desperate to pick out/Your hands, tiny in all that air, applauding’. Who is the person alluded to, and in which poem?
9. Who is the ‘you’ in the following lines?
How beautiful you were, and near, and young,
So vivid, you might still be there among
Those first few days, unfingermarked again.
10. Whose red granite headstone has a line from Larkin’s poem ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘What will survive of us is love’?
11. Larkin and she began an affair in 1975, when they were both in their fifties. After Larkin’s death, it was she who, acting on his wish, destroyed his diaries. Who was she?
12. Larkin writes, ‘We met at the end of the party, /When most of the drinks were dead/And all the glasses dirty.’ Whom did he meet?
13. Referring to his poem ‘Reference Back’, Larkin wrote to Monica Jones, ‘In a sense it is written from her viewpoint.’ Whose viewpoint?
14. Larkin and she became lovers when she was only sixteen, and they were engaged in 1948. The engagement was broken in 1950. Who was she?
15. Which woman does Larkin refer to in the following lines in his poem ‘Wild Oats’?
But it was the friend I took out,
And in seven years after that
Wrote over four hundred letters.
16. Larkin’s relationship with her started in 1946. She moved into Larkin’s house in Newland Park and continued living there even after his death in 1985, till her own death in 2001. Who was she?
17. She was the most loving and intimate love interest of Larkin. She is said to the model for the character of Margaret Peel, Jim Dixon’s girlfriend in Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim. Who was she?
18. She is said to be inspiration for the character of Elvira Jones in Robert Conquest’s novel A World of Difference (1955) and Viola Masefield in Malcolm Bradbury’s novel Eating People Is Wrong. Who is she?
19. Two of the women in Larkin’s life were buried near Larkin’s grave in Cottingham Cemetery near Hull. Who were they?
(a) Eva Larkin and Winifred Arnott
(b) Monica Jones and Ruth Browman
(c) Betty Mackereth and Patsy Strang
(d) Monica Jones and Maeve Brennan
20. Whom does Larkin see in a photograph album, ‘In pigtails, clutching a reluctant cat; … /Or lifting a heavy-headed rose / Beneath a trellis, or in a trilby hat’?
21. Larkin fell in love with the wife of Colin Strand, a friend of his in the Queen’s University, Belfast, where Larkin was a junior librarian. She became pregnant by Larkin but miscarried. Can you identify her?
22. What female pseudonym did Philip Larkin adopt as a lesbian writer of girls’ school stories?
23. In 1999, Ben Brown’s play Larkin with Women dramatised Larkin’s relationships with three of his lovers. Who among the following was not one of them?
(a) Monica Jones
(b) Betty Mackereth
(c) Ruth Bowman
(d) Maeve Brennan
24. Kingsley Amis modelled a character in his novel Lucky Jim on one of the women in Larkin’s lives. What was Larkin’s reaction?
(a) He appreciated the idea.
(b) Amis and Larkin’s relations strengthened.
(c) There was a temporary thaw in their relations.
(d) None of these.
25. About whom did Larkin write the following?
But when the August weather breaks
And rains begin, and brittle frost
Sharpens the bird-abandoned air,
Her worried summer look is lost.
26. Who does Larkin address in the following lines?
That was a pretty one, I heard you call
From the unsatisfactory hall
To the unsatisfactory room where I
Played record after record, idly,
Wasting my time at home, that you
Looked so much forward to.
27. As depicted in Larkin’s little drawings sometimes added to his letters, the three major women in her life appear as a mouse, a rabbit, and a whale. Who is who?
28. Which of Larkin’s women friends wrote the book Philip Larkin I Knew?
(a) Monica Jones
(b) Maeve Brennan
(c) Patsy Mackereth
(d) Ruth Browman
29. Who called Larkin a ‘casual, habitual racist, and an easy misogynist’?
30. Which of Larkin’s women drank herself to death at the age of forty-eight?
31. In which poem does Larkin write, ‘Within the dream you said:/ Let us kiss then./In this room, in this bed’?
32. Ben Brown’s play views Larkin’s life from the perspective of his difficulty with girls, and their difficulties with him. What is the play’s name?