Editing Philip Larkin (section)

===Juvenilia and early works===
{{further|Brunette Coleman}}
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 |quote=And kneel upon the stone,<br />For we have tried<br />All courages on these despairs,<br />And are required lastly to give up pride,<br />And the last difficult pride in being humble.
 |source=''from'' "Come then to prayers" (1946), ''[[Collected Poems – 1988 edition (Philip Larkin)|Collected Poems]]''
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From his mid-teens, Larkin "wrote ceaselessly", producing both poetry, initially modelled on Eliot and W. H. Auden, and fiction: he wrote five full-length novels, each of which he destroyed shortly after their completion.<ref>Bradford 2005, pp. 32–34.</ref> While he was at Oxford University, his first published poem, "Ultimatum", appeared in ''[[The Listener (magazine)|The Listener]]''. He developed a pseudonymous alter ego in this period for his prose: [[Brunette Coleman]]. Under this name he wrote two novellas, ''Trouble at Willow Gables'' and ''Michaelmas Term at St Brides'' (2002), as well as a supposed autobiography and an equally fictitious creative manifesto called "What we are writing for". Richard Bradford has written that these curious works show "three registers: cautious indifference, archly overwritten symbolism with a hint of Lawrence and prose that appears to disclose its writer's involuntary feelings of sexual excitement".<ref>Bradford 2005, p. 51.</ref>

After these works, Larkin began to write his first published novel ''[[Jill (novel)|Jill]]'' (1946). This was published by [[Reginald Caton|Reginald A. Caton]], a publisher of barely legal pornography, who also issued serious fiction as a cover for his core activities.<ref>Bradford 2005, p. 55.</ref> Around the time that ''Jill'' was being prepared for publication, Caton inquired of Larkin if he also wrote poetry. This resulted in the publication, three months before ''Jill'', of ''[[The North Ship]]'' (1945), a collection of poems written between 1942 and 1944 which showed the increasing influence of [[William Butler Yeats|Yeats]]. Immediately after completing ''Jill'', Larkin started work on the novel ''A Girl in Winter'' (1947), completing it in 1945. This was published by [[Faber and Faber]] and was well received, ''[[The Sunday Times]]'' calling it "an exquisite performance and nearly faultless".<ref>Bradford 2005, p. 77.</ref> Subsequently, he made at least three concerted attempts at writing a third novel, but none developed beyond a solid start.<ref>Bradford 2005, p. 75.</ref>