Wikipedia:Today's featured article/August 2, 2012



Brunette Coleman was a pseudonym used by the poet and writer Philip Larkin (1922–1985). In 1943, toward the end of his time as an undergraduate at St John's College, Oxford, he wrote several works of fiction, verse and critical commentary under that name. The style he adopted parodies that of popular writers of contemporary girls' school fiction, but the extent of the stories' homoerotic content suggests they were written primarily for adult male titillation. The Coleman oeuvre consists of a completed novella, Trouble at Willow Gables, set in a girls' boarding school; an incomplete sequel, Michaelmas Term at St Brides, set in a women's college at Oxford; seven short poems with a girls' school ambience; a fragment of pseudo-autobiography; and a critical essay purporting to be Coleman's literary apologia. The manuscripts' existence was revealed to the public when Larkin's Selected Letters and Andrew Motion's biography were published in 1992 and 1993 respectively. The Coleman works themselves were finally published, with other Larkin drafts and oddments, in 2002. Critical reaction was divided. (more...)

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