In the late 1940s, anyone who tried to predict Philip Larkin's career as a writer would have assumed that he would be a novelist. He had by then published two novels, the second with Faber & Faber, probably Britain's most prestigious literary publishers, and only one, rather derivative, volume of poems; his attempts to publish a second volume were meeting with no success. It was not until some years later that he finally abandoned his attempts at a third novel; and, as he was reluctantly obliged to give up fiction, he began to achieve success as a poet. Today, Larkin's novels are read mainly for the light they throw on his poetry, though both of them are worth reading for their own sake.

His development as a novelist was the reverse of his development as a poet. Jill, written in 1943–4, seems to belong to the realist movement of the 1950s, much concerned with class differences, and resembles the novels of John Braine, Kingsley Amis, and John Wain – the last two were friends of Larkin's, and closely associated with him as poets of the ‘Movement’. A Girl in Winter, written a year later, is much more evocative, and reads more like the work of the early Larkin of The North Ship.

Jill is the story of John Kemp, a working-class boy from Lancashire who goes to Oxford in wartime and is faced with two contrasting (and hostile) worlds. They can be described as the world of those who eat carefully and that of those who eat carelessly (the novel is filled with vivid scenes of eating and drinking), and this difference is, of course, a matter of social class. On the one hand, there is Whitbread, like John a scholarship boy from the north of England, earnest and plodding, who works hard not because he likes studying (no one in the book is actually interested in his academic work), but with a calculating eye on career prospects; and, on the other, there is Warner, with whom John shares rooms, product of a minor public school, hard-drinking, coarse, and self-indulgent, who treats John with patronizing contempt. Whitbread has a scrupulous sense of property, whereas Warner steals food, borrows money, and breaks up other people's rooms.