Monica Jones - Monica Jones

Monica Jones

Larkin's long and extremely close relationship with Monica Jones dated from the autumn of 1946, when they met at Leicester University College. Jones had been appointed as an assistant lecturer in English in January 1946 and Larkin arrived in September, as an assistant librarian. "Both had been at Oxford (he at St John's, she at St Hugh's), between 1940 and 1943, but had not met. Both had first class degrees in English. They had been born in the same year, 1922, and came from rather similar provincial middle-class backgrounds." For the first few years of the relationship, Larkin was involved with Ruth Bowman, but when Bowman broke off the engagement, "Monica quickly became central to Larkin's attention." Jones and Larkin had a holiday cottage at Haydon Bridge where they spent many summers together. He left the bulk of his estate to her when he died in 1985. She died on 15 February 2001.

Monica Jones was born Margaret Monica Beale Jones on 7 May 1922 in Llanelli, South Wales. She moved with her family to Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire when aged seven. Educated at Kidderminster High School for Girls, she won a scholarship to study English at Oxford University, a period of her life which was immensely influential to her; she acquired her distinctive accent and flamboyant dress sense whilst studying there.

Jones taught at Leicester University from 1946 until 1981 when she retired. She never published anything during her academic career, she "regarded publishing as a bit showy", though she was noted for "the panache of her lecturing, in which, for example, she would wear a Scottish tartan when talking about Macbeth. " Her literary enthusiasms, (not entirely shared by Larkin), included Walter Scott, Jane Austen and George Crabbe. They shared enthusiasm for Thomas Hardy and Barbara Pym, and swapped scornful opinions of C. P. Snow, Pamela Hansford Johnson, William Cooper, and others. They shared a sympathy with animals, both of them deplored vivisection and myxomatosis, were fond of Beatrix Potter's creations, and of real creatures, in particular cats and rabbits, though Monica Jones had a fear of hens, and of some other birds. Larkin's letters to Jones were sometimes "embellished with skilful sketches", Jones as a rabbit ("Dearest bun"), himself as a seal.

Following a fall downstairs in October 1982 in her Haydon Bridge cottage she went into Hexham Hospital, and then convalesced with Larkin in his house in Hull. She returned to Haydon Bridge when recovered, but at Easter 1983 she was stricken with shingles and on leaving hospital this time Larkin, "offered her shelter and care in his house in Newland Park, Hull." Following his death, in December 1985, "Monica hardly left that house in Hull until her own death in February 2001."

She is said to be the model for the character of Margaret Peel, Jim Dixon's manipulative on-again-off-again girlfriend, in Kingsley Amis's novel Lucky Jim (1954). Monica Jones may also be the inspiration for the character Elvira Jones in Robert Conquest's 1955 novel A World of Difference. The book contains other "Larkinesque" references, including a spaceship named after the poet. She has also been suggested as the model for Viola Masefield in Malcolm Bradbury's first novel, Eating People is Wrong.