Is he trying to educate those readers only interested in pornography, who, he perhaps supposes, have no background information about anything at all, or does he imagine that Larkin's avid readers are too young to have heard of Benny Goodman? Yet those thoughts in time become fodder for her work, and Monroe provides Minnie a new way of understanding herself.

Once you've got Marie under the cane, the observer is free to embellish and impose his or her own private schoolgirl fantasies.The story begins with a man approaching fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu, seeking company for his friend Elvis Presley. Minnie aspires to be an artist—she idolizes Aline Kominsky—despite the distraction of her “all-consuming thoughts about sex and men. Pauline Reage and the Marquis de Sade would recognise the architecture of these pieces, but where Reage and Sade offered precisely detailed illustrations of the experiences of O and Justine, Larkin sketches a mere outline and then walks away with a snigger. This is an interesting question - or as interesting a question as I can come up with given the material I'm working on.

In the latest exclusive online essay from the London Review of Books, Jenny Diski examines Larkin's newly-published juvenilia and questions whether such literary excavation is simply barrel-scraping.

Otherwise why would he bother with footnotes informing his readers that Hugh Walpole was a "popular novelist", Benny Goodman an "American clarinettist and bandleader (1909-86), nicknamed 'the King of Swing'"; and that Myfanwy's comment "Ours not to reason why" is an inaccurate reference to "'Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do or die .