Trouble at Willow Gables and other fictions

[First Edition]. Thick 8vo. Pp. xlvi, 498. Cobalt blue paper boards, lettered in ochre-yellow to spine; striated blue endpapers. Acknowledgements, Introduction, A Note on the Text. Edited by James Booth.

Excised title-page, dustwrapper partially torn along spine fold – but holding – else Fine.

A volume collecting Larkin's hitherto unpublished novellas, Trouble at Willow Gables and Michaelmas Term at St Bride's, the poem sequence Sugar and Spice, unfinished drafts of two novels, No For An Answer and A New World Symphony, and two short débats which dramatise his sense of failure as a novelist and his rejection of marriage. Known collectively as the Brunette Coleman Material, these saucy pastiches of breathless girls' fiction that was popular between the wars, were written during his "lesbian phase," whilst still an Oxford undergraduate.