Monica Jones clung to the affair with Philip Larkin, 'however galling the compromises on offer'. The pair pictured here in Scotland CREDIT: Hull University Archives/ Hull History Centre/ Philip Larkin estate/Society of Authors

The miserable life of Larkin’s mistress, kept on tap for kinky sex and holidays

Using unpublished letters, John Sutherland's book Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me reveals the tragic squandering of a brilliant woman

Rupert Christiansen

25 April 2021

“Iam simply ridiculous – a reject, an incapable” wrote Monica Jones in 1955. This wasn’t a passing moment of hysterical despair: over her entire adult life, she would refer to herself as “the old bag”, an “ordinary little worm” or “a dull unleavened lump” in self-lacerating recognition that her existence was a pathetic flop. And that is how posterity is in danger of picturing Philip Larkin’s mistress: a harpy in horn-rimmed spectacles who drank and shouted and made a fool of herself in an increasingly desperate campaign to keep hold of the man she loved.

Philip Larkin and Monica Jones

Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me by John Sutherland review

She was a vile racist, a depressed companion to a constitutionally unfaithful man, but Monica Jones was also the woman who cultivated the aesthetic sensibility of one of the greatest poets of the last century, says Tomiwa Owolade

Towiwa Owolade

15 April 2021

J

ohn Sutherland’s memoir-cum-biography hinges on a profound question: how well do we truly know a person? Sutherland - who is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at UCL, and author of, among other books, Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives - ponders which Monica Jones is more real: “The Monica I knew as a young man in the 1960s? Or the Monica I now know from thousands of pages of manuscript documentation, sixty years on?”.  

 

Joan Bakewell

Joan Bakewell: I met Harold Pinter in Paris and was back for children's supper

18 April, 2017 07:06

Joan Bakewell has told how she once jetted to Paris to spend the day with playwright Harold Pinter during their affair before returning to England to cook dinner for her children.

The Labour peer, 84, is preparing to release her own account of the eight-year relationship nearly four decades after Pinter used it as the basis for his play Betrayal.