For Philip Larkin, see the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. See also Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, (London, 1993).

Margaret Monica Beale Jones, teacher and academic, was born in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, 7 May 1922, and died in Hull, Yorkshire, 15 February 2001. Jones, to whom Larkin dedicated 'The Less Deceived' in 1955, was perhaps that poet’s most enduring and influential companion.

After attending the girls' high school at Kidderminster, Jones won a scholarship to read English at St Hugh's College, Oxford. After a short time as a schoolteacher she moved to Leicester in 1946 to take up an assistant lectureship at the University College of Leicester (later Leicester University) which she held until 1981.

It was here that Jones met Larkin when in 1946 he took up a position in the college’s library. From 1950, when Larkin left Leicester to take up an appointment at the Queen’s University Library, until 1973, when both Jones and Larkin apparently acquired telephones, the pair maintained a regular correspondence. Upon leaving her position at Leicester in 1981 Jones moved into Larkin’s house in Hull, where she lived until her death in 2001.

The relationship between Larkin and Jones is described in Andrew Motion's 1993 biography of Larkin. Fictional representations of Jones appear in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (Margaret Peel), and Eating People is Wrong (Viola Masefield) by Malcolm Bradbury, a former student.