A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin

First published: 1947

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: Sometime in the mid-1930’s and early 1940’s

Locale: A provincial town in England and a village in south Oxfordshire, England

Principal Characters:

• Katherine Lind, the protagonist, a foreign girl visiting and later living in England
• Robin Fennel, her teenage English pen pal
• Jane Fennel, his sister
• Lancelot Anstey, the librarian at Katherine’s place of work
• Miss Green, a junior library assistant

The Novel

A Girl in Winter is divided into three parts. The main action, in parts 1 and 3, takes place on a winter Saturday in the life of Katherine Lind, a twenty-two-year-old wartime refugee from an unnamed European country. The second part is a flashback to a three-week summer holiday which Katherine had taken in England six years previously.

Katherine, from whose point of view the story is told, has been in wartime England for nearly two years and has secured a routine job in a public library. The work is far below what her intelligence and education merit, and she is constantly irritated by her boss, the self-educated, boorish, and pompous Lancelot Anstey. One morning, as the novel opens, Katherine is eagerly awaiting a letter from her former pen pal, Robin Fennel. She has not seen him for six years, since the time, when they were both sixteen-year-old schoolchildren, that he had invited her to stay with his family in England. She is asked to accompany a junior employee, Miss Green, who is suffering from a toothache, to the dentist. On returning to her rooms later, she discovers the letter from Robin, who is now in the army, saying that he will be calling on her that very afternoon. Katherine is alarmed by this, however, and leaves the house without leaving any message for him.

The second and longest section of the novel flashes back to Katherine’s first taste of England, when she had stayed at the Fennels’ house in a village in Oxfordshire. Her visit was neither an outstanding success nor a great failure. Robin’s parents were kind and solicitous, but as for Robin himself, she never managed to penetrate beyond his courteous, precocious, self-confident exterior. He did not seem to express much interest in her, beyond the demands of politeness, except for an impulsive and clumsy kiss bestowed on the eve of her departure. For a few days she had fallen in love with him and attempted to draw him out, but her feelings only made her miserable. She was puzzled by his attitude, but it turned out that it had not been Robin’s idea to invite her, but that of his sister Jane, a rather aimless, sarcastic girl, nine years their senior, whom Katherine did not particularly like.

Part 3 returns to the present. Katherine recalls how she quickly lost touch with the Fennels following her visit and then dwells on her current loneliness, isolation, and pessimism regarding the future. She has developed a tendency to idealize the past. She calls on a Miss Veronica Parbury to return a handbag which she had picked up by mistake, and in conversation she discovers by chance that Miss Parbury has received a marriage proposal from Lancelot Anstey. Miss Parbury intends to turn down the proposal, however, because she is fully occupied in caring for her invalid mother. Returning to work, Katherine is rebuked by Anstey for lateness, but she gets her revenge by alluding to his affair with Veronica.

When Katherine returns home after work, she finds Robin on the doorstep, slightly drunk. They quickly catch up on the important events in each other’s lives since they had last met, but they soon find that they have little to say to each other. To her, he seems like no more than a chance acquaintance, and she can do no more than extend an impersonal hospitality. When he asks her if he can stay the night, she refuses, but he persists and eventually she agrees, feeling indifferent to the proposition and agreeing only because she thinks it an “unimportant kindness” which would quickly be forgotten. The novel ends with them asleep in bed together, but there is no sense of closeness between them.

The Characters

The chief interest of the novel lies in the development of the two main characters, Katherine Lind and Robin Fennel, since with the exception of the superb sketch of the self-important, wordy, unpleasant Lancelot Anstey, Philip Larkin does not lavish much attention on his minor characters.

The distinguishing characteristic of Katherine is that she is alone. This is partly a result of her foreignness, of which she is continually aware. She is forced to do the odd jobs at the library that no one else wants, which only emphasizes “that she was foreign and had no proper status there.” There is more than one hint that the English do not take kindly to foreigners in times of war.

The shock of her removal from her own country reinforces her isolation as she refuses to make friends. She resolves not to trust or to love, although in the past her happiness came from her relationships with other people. Now she believes that her strength must come solely from herself, but she cannot avoid the realization that her life has become like “a flat landscape, wry and rather small.” She has temporarily managed to convince herself that her meeting with Robin will change all that.

The events of the day force her into a modification of her attitudes. When she accompanies the wretched Miss Green, she feels protective and generous, happy at once more having someone who depends on her. Her happiness is also, however, a result of the expectations she holds for her renewed contact with Robin. Later in the day, when she talks with Miss Parbury and learns of her relationship with Anstey and of her invalid mother, Katherine senses “the undertow of people’s relations, two-thirds of which is without face, with only begging and lonely hands.” She cannot forget Miss Parbury’s selflessness in placing her mother’s welfare above her own.

When she returns to work and finds a telegram *from Robin saying that he is not coming, the vain hope she was entertaining, that her life could dramatically change for the better, is suddenly destroyed. Yet her eventful day has left its mark. She seems to realize that human beings do owe something to one another, merely by the fact of being fellow travelers. Although she now cares little for Robin, when he turns up unexpectedly she can think of no reason to deny him the pleasure which she has power to bestow. The fellow traveler has a right to her tenderness. She, at least, has found a serenity which he cannot touch, whatever happens. It is quite unlike her behavior as an adolescent, when she carelessly reached out to him with her emotions, or how only a few hours previously she had eagerly awaited his visit. The lovemaking between them is merely a transient act; it carries no obligations and will soon be forgotten.

Robin Fennel’s growth is from certainty to uncertainty. Like that of Katherine, it involves a loss of comforting illusions. As a sixteen-year-old, there was an easy confidence in his judgments. Katherine noticed that he acted “as if he had long ago made up his mind about her,” and she also observed that his movements were “always beautifully finished and calm.” It seemed as if he had an “almost supernatural maturity [which] suggested that he drew on some spiritual calm.” Not only did he have his career planned out in advance, but he also knew at what age he wanted to marry.

He is now an adult, however, and all this has changed. Physically restless and mentally on edge, Robin is in a state of “perpetual unease” and attempts to disguise his discomfort under a false and irritatingly jocular manner. When Katherine questions him about his career, he replies, “Everything’s so uncertain.” He has grown accustomed to making no plans for his activities further than a week ahead. The war, he complains, has “broken the sequence,” yet he no longer cares much about the future. In refuting her reason for refusing to sleep with him—that it would be meaningless—he reveals a nihilism which would have been quite foreign to the sixteen-year-old: “I don’t see that anything means very much. I spend all my time doing things that don’t matter twopence. So do you.”

Critical Context

Larkin wrote only two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter. After these, he devoted all of his attention to poetry. A Girl in Winter has much in common with the earlier novel. Both deal with isolation and the building up and breaking down of illusions. Like Katherine Lind, John Kemp, the hero of Jill, is a stranger in the society in which he finds himself, the upper-class undergraduate world at Oxford which will not accept him. He also has to cope with radical discontinuity in his life, and he, too, indulges in a fantasy world, although to a far greater extent than does Katherine. When his illusions fail to stand up in the light of the real world, he reflects “how little anything matters.... See how appallingly little life is,” phrases that are strikingly similar to the conclusions reached, respectively, by Robin and Katherine.

Larkin held a low opinion of his own novels, but critic John Bayley has described A Girl in Winter as “one of the finest and best sustained prose poems in the language,” a view which is not difficult to justify. It is valuable, among other things, for its conciseness, its concern for detail, and its convincing exploration of the feelings of a woman of delicate sensibility. It also looks forward to many of the concerns expressed in Larkin’s poetry: the need for honesty and for realistic self-knowledge, the difficulty of obtaining intimacy in relationships, the oppressive nature of time (in the novel Robin cannot stand the ticking of Katherine’s watch), and the cheerlessness of life.

Bibliography

Martin, Bruce. Philip Larkin, 1978.

Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin, 1982.

Petch, Simon. The Art of Philip Larkin, 1981.

Timms, David. Philip Larkin, 1973.