Patricia Avis (1928–1977)

Patsy StrangSouth African-born and married to philosophy lecturer Colin Strang, she met Larkin in Queen’s University, Belfast, and had an affair with him from 1952 to 1955. She subsequently married Richard Murphy, with whom she had a daughter, Emily. They divorced in 1959 and she moved to Dublin, where she died of alcoholic poisoning in 1977. Her lightly fictionalised Playing the Harlot, written under her maiden name of Patricia Avis and documenting the literary set she knew in the 1950s, was posthumously published in 1996.