This was not the Oxford of Michael Fane and his fine bindings, or Charles Ryder and his plovers' eggs. Its pre-war pattern had been dispersed, in some instances permanently. Larkin writes of his own experiences of Oxford during the war in the Introduction he added for the republication by Faber and Faber in 1964: Kemp becomes infatuated with Gillian, but his advances are thwarted by Elizabeth and rebuffed by Gillian. Kemp then discovers a real-life Jill called Gillian, the 15-year-old cousin of Warner's friend Elizabeth. The eponymous Jill is Kemp's imaginary sister, whom he invents to confound Warner. Socially awkward and inexperienced, Kemp is attracted by the reckless and dissipated life of his roommate Christopher Warner, a well-off southerner who has attended a minor public school, tellingly called ' Lamprey College'. With great sympathy it analyses his emotions at this first experience of privileged southern life (he had never been south of Crewe). Protagonist John Kemp is a young man from 'Huddlesford' in Lancashire, who goes up to Oxford. The novel is set in wartime Oxford, the city in which it was written.

It was written between 19, when Larkin was twenty-one years old and an undergraduate at St John's College, Oxford. Jill is a novel by English writer Philip Larkin, first published in 1946 by The Fortune Press, and reprinted by Faber and Faber (London) in 1964.

The Less Deceived by Philip Larkin