Which poet and author used the pseudonym 'Brunette Coleman' when writing some of his early work?
Brunette Coleman finish several more novels, in the last of which, "A New World Symphony", he returned once again to the device of a female protagonist-narrator. The novel was finally abandoned around 1954. Notes References Brunette Coleman Brunette Coleman was a pseudonym used by the poet and writer Philip Larkin. In 1943, towards the end of his time as an undergraduate at St John's College, Oxford, he wrote several works of fiction, verse and critical commentary under that name. The style he adopted parodies that of popular writers of contemporary girls' school fiction, but the extent of the stories' homoerotic content suggests
Brunette Coleman home while awaiting his Finals results. That was the prelude to a busy summer's writing: "Leaving Oxford was like taking a cork out of a bottle. Writing flooded out of me", Larkin later told his biographer. Larkin's letter to Iles does not mention a female pseudonym, although the idea of using one had been in his mind for months. The previous March he had begun writing the imagined autobiography of a supposed lady novelist, "Brunette Coleman", adapting the name of a well-known contemporary female jazz musician, Blanche Coleman. Larkin tentatively titled the autobiography "Ante Meridian"; he soon abandoned it, but