NEW light has been cast on the life of Philip Larkin with the revelation that his first love was a fellow student at Oxford University with whom he became captivated when he saw her dressed as a eunuch in a production of Twelfth Night.

Don Lee, a committee member of the Larkin Society, discovered the poet’s unrequited love for Penelope Scott Stokes in unpublished verses in the Philip Larkin Archive at Hull University, where the poet was a professor.

Larkin, who died in 1985, a year after turning down the chance to be Poet Laureate, wrote two poems for Scott Stokes, a boyish Somerville College student with an Eton-crop haircut. He changed the ending of one and discarded the second after she married an anti-tank officer she had met during the summer holidays in 1942.

The revelation that Larkin’s first love was a tomboy is critical to understanding how Larkin felt at a time when he was confused about his sexuality.

Larkin, in his third term at St John’s College, had written a poem to her entitled Sonnet: Penelope, August, 1942, describing his anticipation of seeing her again, but rewrote it when he realised he probably never would. The first ten lines remained intact, but he stripped the poem of its title and rewrote the last four lines to change the ending from fearful anticipation to gloom and relief that he would not need to confront her.

He published the revised version in The North Ship, his first book of verse. He describes his relief that the relationship, which he imagines as a fruit tree, is “cut, gummed”, and his sorrow that his summer vacation is “broke and drained”.

In the unpublished poem, written a year later, Larkin writes that he is ashamed of his romantic outpourings in his previous poem.

Poem for Penelope also mentions his dismal feelings of living at his parents’ house, with rooms like “cells of a great mad brain” and his parents’ voices “crossing like cheap scissors in the stale air”.

Scott Stokes, who died in 1999, later wrote to Anthony Thwaite, a Larkin scholar, that at university “I was very much the girl-boy, cycling around Oxford. My scout (college servant) called me Tommy.”

Larkin invited her to tea, a mealtime he later described in erotic detail in his novel Jill, but she refused because she was involved with another man.

Susannah Tarbush, one of three children from Scott Stokes’s marriage to the anti-tank officer, told The Times: “I am confident that she never consummated her relationship with Larkin.”

Larkin never forgot her and included her as a minor character in Michaelmas Term at St Bride’s, a lesbian romp that was not published until 2002 in Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions. She appears as a small schoolgirl called Penelope with an Eton crop, an “unemphatic bosom” and a phobia about worms.

Nor did Scott Stokes forget Larkin. Penelope Baily, as she became, wrote to Larkin in the mid-1960s when she self-published her own book of poetry and the pair met in York.

Don Lee, who made the discovery, will explain the full story of his detective work at the Warwick Words Festival next Sunday, October 9.

LARKIN'S WOMEN

Ruth Bowman Larkin’s first serious girlfriend. He was unsure whether to marry her or break up with her until he met Monica Jones in 1946

Monica Jones Referred to by Larkin as “Dearest Bun”, Jones met Larkin at University College, Leicester, where he was a librarian. She was an English lecturer and became his longest-standing girlfriend and closest confidante, visiting him often at his house in Hull

Betty Mackereth Began an affair with Larkin in the mid-1970s. He described her in Toads Revisited as his “loaf-haired secretary”. She fulfilled one of his final requests by shredding and burning his diaries a few weeks after his death

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