INTRODUCTION

Between December 1946 and April 1984, Philip Larkin wrote to Monica Jones more than 1,421 letters and 521 postcards: about 7,500 surviving pages altogether. Other letters have apparently been lost or have disappeared. He wrote from his parents' house in Warwick, from Leicester, Belfast, Hull, his mother's house in Loughborough, London, Oxford, and elsewhere. Apart from Larkin's family letters, chiefly those written to his mother for over thirty years of her widowhood, they form the most extensive correspondence of his life. Certainly they mark his most important relationship. It was to Monica that the dying Larkin entrusted the fate of his copious diaries ('Make sure those diaries are destroyed'); and indeed soon after Larkin's death on 2 December 1985 Monica handed over the diaries to his former secretary Betty Mackereth, who fed them into the shredder in the Brynmor Jones Library, Hull. However, these many letters to Monica survive, and they chronicle his life and his attitudes more intimately than anything else we have.

In the Introduction to my edition of Larkin's Selected Letters (1992), with Monica Jones at that time ailing but still alive for another nine years (though deeply depressed and deeply disorganised), I wrote:

The . long and extremely close relationship with Monica Jones, dating from 1946 in Leicester, is shown only fragmentarily here; but, again, apparent losses may later be recovered.

In fact, at my request Monica had earlier searched and had found about twenty letters in the house in Hull she had inherited from Larkin at his death. I used thirteen of them, or extracts from them, in the edition. Later, as Andrew Motion has recorded, he went to Monica's cottage in Haydon Bridge, Northumberland, and found many more (several in a distressed state, affected by water and mould). He drew on some of these in his biography of Larkin, published in 1993.

What I never could have guessed is the quantity of letters that emerged after Monica's death in 2001. These were gathered together, as the property of the Estate of Monica Jones and were sold by that Estate, through the London specialist dealers, Bernard Quaritch, to the Bodleian Library, Oxford - which is also where all Monica's surviving letters to Larkin are deposited.

Monica Jones and Philip Larkin first met in the autumn of 1946 at Leicester University College. Monica had been appointed as an Assistant Lecturer in English there in January 1946. Larkin arrived in September 1946, as an Assistant Librarian. (The total library staff then was three people.) Both had been at Oxford (he at St John's, she at St Hugh's) between 1940 and 1943, but they had never met there. Both had First Class degrees in English. They had been born in the same year, 1922, and came from rather similar provincial middle-class backgrounds. Monica was an only child: Larkin had an older sister, Kitty, but the ten-year age gap, and differences of temperament, kept them apart.

For the first few years of the relationship, Larkin was involved with Ruth Bowman, whom he had met in Wellington when she was a sixth-former. Indeed, when he returned from his Belfast interview in June 1950, he had a blurred notion that he and Ruth could marry and 'start life afresh in a far countrie' (as he put it in a letter to his old schoolfriend Jim Sutton). But when Ruth, in exasperation and misery, broke off the engagement, Monica quickly became central to Larkin's attention. He touches on this in a long letter started on 23 May 1951, in which he writes about 'the progress of my misengagement'.

Monica's long career teaching at Leicester University (from 1946 until she retired in 1981) was marked in particular by two things. First, there was the panache of her lecturing, in which, for example, she would wear a Scottish tartan when talking about Macbeth. (Some were rather shocked by her. A former student, now in her late seventies, recalled: 'In my then opinion, Miss Jones was very suspiciously blonde, very highly made-up, and talked a great deal without asking our opinion of anything. All that was excusable, but what really upset me was that her tops were much too low at the front.') Second, Monica regarded publishing as a bit showy, and she never in fact published anything during the whole of her academic career. This held her back from any promotion. She agonised about her lecture preparation, marking and the awfulness of many of her colleagues, in a way that is paralleled by Larkin's complaints. They fed each other's misery.

Monica and Larkin's friendship and correspondence began with books and reading. The very first letter partly concerns him lending her a copy of his novel Jill, recently published by the Fortune Press, and proofs of A Girl in Winter, which Faber were to publish in February 1947. Over the years much else was added to books and reading: gossip and rancour about colleagues; the irksomeness of work; eating, drinking, indigestion; actual and supposed illnesses; sport (chiefly cricket, but also boxing); music; films; planning holidays and looking back on them; and a great deal of affectionate whimsy about their version of the world of Beatrix Potter, embellished with Larkin's skilful sketches.

Their literary enthusiasms weren't entirely the same. Monica was much keener than Larkin was on Walter Scott, Jane Austen and George Crabbe. From early on, and right through, Larkin was fascinated by D. H. Lawrence. They shared a delight in Hardy, and in Barbara Pym. They were equally scornful about many reputations of the time - C. P. Snow, Pamela Hansford Johnson, William Cooper, Marghanita Laski, and dozens of others.

Another running theme is Larkin's feelings about his old St John's friend, Kingsley Amis - about Amis's spectacular success with Lucky Jim in 1954, his domestic life, his marital and other affairs, and frequently Larkin's exasperation with the man. Monica and Amis were always wary of one another: she knew he had cruelly drawn on her in his portrait of 'Margaret' in Lucky Jim.

As well as Amis, other names frequently recur. There is the Vice Chancellor of Hull, Brynmor Jones, privately mocked by Larkin for his alleged Welsh obtuseness; Larkin's deputy in the Library for many years, Arthur Wood, on whom many painful fantasy humiliations are heaped; Monica's Leicester colleagues, from her first chief (A. S. Collins - on the whole approved of) to later ones (Arthur Humphreys, P. A. W. Collins, both reviled) who are frequently gossiped about. Peter Coveney, for long Warden of Needler Hall, Hull, is mocked too, but his thoughtfulness and kindness, after Larkin's mysterious collapse, hospitalisation and subsequent convalescence in 1961, are taken notice of. George Hartley, founder with his then wife, Jean, of the poetry journal Listen and then the Marvell Press, at an early stage is burdened with the derisive title the 'ponce of Hessle'. Robert Conquest, who first wrote to Larkin early in 1955 concerning what was to become the anthology New Lines, is much mentioned too. Larkin showed some interest in, and even cultivated a slightly voulu jealousy about, some of Monica's 'young men' - chiefly students at Leicester who seemed attracted to her: Bill Ruddick, John Sutherland, and others.

These are discursive letters, full of the sense of someone talking, entertaining, complaining, exchanging bits of shared argot, but often analysing too. 'Life is first boredom, then fear': there is much mention of both. Larkin often itemised his daily rounds and common tasks - changing his sheets, washing his sheets, washing his socks, mending his socks, mowing his mother's lawn when he was staying with her, mowing his own when he eventually had his own house at 105 Newland Park.

The letters are linked by the long-lasting affectionate playfulness of the two of them: he a seal, she a rabbit ('Dearest bun'); the harsh cries, or laughs, or exclamations of seagulls (ogh ogh, Awwghgh!) in reaction to the idiots and idiocies they came across. Larkin realised - quite often realised - how the two of them were closely bound, ill-suited in some ways to deal with the world, and yet oddly drawn together. On 26 May 1955 he wrote: 'We are strange correspondents, each sitting in his tiny threadbare uncomfortable life, sending messages of hope and good cheer'; and again, on 26 September 1957, 'We are a queer pair, each with vast, almost complementary drawbacks.' It is clear, at times, that Monica would have been glad to marry him; Larkin, with many guilty twinges, always drew back. His intermittent, very close relationship with Maeve Brennan in Hull caused much grief and much analysis.

It was to Monica that Larkin poured out his fears and miseries - on moving from Leicester to Belfast and then to Hull, and living in successive lodgings, for instance. Solitude - 'peace and quiet' - was much sought by Larkin, as is apparent throughout his life, his letters, and his poems. He was irritated and depressed by the intrusion of noise and noisy neighbours in his various lodgings and flats, a frequent burden in these letters until in 1974 for the first time he moved into a house of his own, by which time his correspondence with Monica had dwindled to almost nothing.

He was burdened by the mess he thought he was making of his job in Hull (though by all other accounts he was a notably successful head of the Brynmor Jones Library). He was terrified by the mystery of his collapse and hospitalisation in March 1961, and poured out this terror in what is one of the longest letters in this collection....