'Smaller and clearer as the years go by': Women and girls in the works of Philip Larkin

Over the thirty years of his literary career discussed in this dissertation, Philip Larkin showed remarkable movement toward a more realistic and sensitive portrayal of women and girls.;In The North Ship, most of Larkin's perceptions of females reflect the influence of certain female stereotypes: woman as other and object rather than subject; woman as a reflector and clarifier of the male experience; woman as fantasy; woman as symbol, something other than herself. Even in this volume, though, Larkin sees beyond these restrictions in a poem such as "Ugly Sister," for example.;Jill is a novel about a young man trying to enter manhood in a hostile environment, and Larkin primarily uses women and girls to help him indict the male attitude that devalues the sensitive, feminine side of boys and men and exploits girls and women. Larkin's desire to debunk the idea of woman as "other," which he sees as stripping women of their humanity and contributing to their abuse, is also present in Jill, found in John Kemp's and Larkin's desire to liberate Jill from John's literary control and in the novel's criticism of Christopher Warner's exploitative attitude toward girls and women. A Girl in Winter marks a major shift in Larkin's approach to women: he makes a female the subject rather than object of his work and looks closely and candidly at the female experience. The result is Katherine Lind's story of female isolation, vulnerability, conflict; life as a literal and figurative foreigner; and desire for rescue by a male. But at the end of the novel, Larkin also sees the possibility of self-reliance in a woman and her being part of the human community rather than isolated.;The Less Deceived further explores the uniqueness of the female experience in poems such as "Maiden Name," "Deceptions," and "Born Yesterday." The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows continue to see women's uniqueness but also view women as fellow-travellers with men, seeking comfort from each other and sharing the range of experiences and emotions that are part of human existence, regardless of our individual circumstances.