TROUBLE AT WILLOW GABLES: And Other Fictions.

First edition, first printing. Inscribed by the editor. From the library of Professor Edwin A. Dawes. Original blue paper-covered boards lettered in white to the spine, in the Pentagram designed dustwrapper. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. The pages are, as usual, lightly toned owing to the low quality paper stock. In the dustwrapper, fine except for some light creasing to the lower edge of the spine. Not price-clipped (£20.00 to the front flap). A very nice inscribed association copy.

Inscribed by the editor in black ink to the title page, "Eddie and Amy / with very best wishes, / James (10 June 2002)". Edwin Dawes (1925-2023), from whose library this volume came, was Reckitt Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Hull, later serving as the University's Pro Vice Chancellor, Dean of Science, and Chair of the Library Committee. Dawes first knew Philip Larkin in the latter's capacity as chief librarian at the university, the two soon becoming close friends, Dawes later founding the (posthumous) Philip Larkin Society (of which James Booth, the editor of this volume, was literary advisor and editor of the Society's journal). He was also an award-winning magician and historian of magic. 'Trouble at Willow Gables' takes its title from the novella Larkin wrote under the name Brunette Coleman, a pseudonym he employed for a series of stories based on "an affectionate familiarity with the popular schoolgirl stories of the time" and which seem to have been written to be shared among a few select friends (Diana Gollancz, Bruce Montgomery and Kingsley Amis are mentioned). 'Willow Gables' was the only full-length work completed. 'Michaelmas Term at St Bride's', its unfinished sequel, is also here, as are a sequence of poems, an "autobiographical" sketch of Coleman, and an essay by her. The merits of these works is debatable, and has been debated by the book's reviewers but, as James Booth notes, the care Larkin lavished upon the typescripts suggests that they were more than a mere frippery. More significant for Larkin devotees is the inclusion of the unfinished drafts of the two novels Larkin attempted to write after the two – 'Jill' (1946) and 'A Girl in Winter' (1947) – he completed and published. "'I wanted to 'be a novelist' in a way I never wanted to 'be a poet'", Larkin explained in his Paris Review interview, "Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems", and novelists, he later wrote "requir[e] a wider and more detailed knowledge of life as it is lived, and therefore a keener interest in it" than poets, or at least Larkin (in his own estimation) possessed. Admirers of the finished novels (John Bayley describes 'A Girl in Winter' as 'One of the finest and most sustained prose poems in the language') will be grateful for a glimpse into the two – 'No For An Answer' and 'A New World Symphony' – the author left unfinished.