THE LAND

Reprint. A copy that used to belong to Monica Jones (1922-2001), lover, confidante, and lifelong correspondent of the poet, Philip Larkin, with a 1943 gift inscription to her ("from Mollie") in blue ink to the front free endpaper. The book later belonged to James Booth, Larkin's biographer and editor and former Professor of English at the University of Hull, with his name in pencil to the upper corner of the title page. Original terracotta cloth with a white paper label lettered the same colour affixed to the spine, in the neatly price-clipped dustwrapper. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth and label sharp and clean, the contents clean throughout. Complete with the lightly creased and nicked original dustwrapper which is a little toned at the spine with a 2 cm closed tear to the upper edge of the front spine fold. A copy with a pleasing (double) Philip Larkin association.

"I sing the cycle of my country's year". Vita Sackville-West's poetic celebration of the of the seasons and the agricultural year, set in the Kentish Weald, both looks back to Virgil's 'Georgics' (from which it takes its epigraph) and sideways at Eliot's recent 'The Waste Land' (a poem likewise preoccupied with seasonal change and renewal). The poem was well-received, winning the 1927 Hawthornden Prize. This copy was a gift to Monica Jones in May 1943, when she was completing her final exams at Oxford, as was the young Philip Larkin. The two were exact contemporaries at the university (he at St John's, she at St Hugh's College) but didn't meet until 1946, both finding themselves at the University of Leicester, Jones as an Assistant Lecturer in English, Larkin as Assistant Librarian. He soon moved on, first to Belfast and then to Hull, but the relationship endured, periodically in person, more often by letter. Except for his mother, Monica was the most significant woman in the poet's life. Nearly two thousand letters, postcards and telegrams from Larkin were discovered following her death, many of them published in 'Letters to Monica' (2010), edited by Anthony Thwaite (who, with Jones and Andrew Motion served as Larkin's literary executors). Sackville-West's long poem was clearly significant for Monica, and she seems, much later, to have recommended the work to Larkin. "As I said", he writes in a letter to Jones in September 1969, "I did enjoy reading 'The Land' -- some of it's crap, but there are three or four fine passages". He was at the time beginning work on compiling 'The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse' (1973), for which he chose two passages from the poem. Appropriately, Monica's copy later became the possession of Professor James Booth, editor, biographer and Larkin's former colleague at the University of Hull. (Cross and Ravenscroft-Hulme A.13 (d))