Two years later, the pair met again and had sex in a field, with Golding again introducing crudity by quoting the girl's foreplay remark: 'Should I have all that rammed up my guts?' She fought him off and ran away as he stood there shouting: 'I'm not going to hurt you,' the memoir said. It reveals that Golding told his wife he had been sure the girl 'wanted heavy sex'. It happened when he was 18 and on holiday during his first year at Oxford.Ĭarey quotes the memoir as partially excusing the attempted rape on the grounds that Dora was 'depraved by nature' and, at 14, was 'already sexy as an ape'. The attempted rape involved a Marlborough girl, named Dora, who had taken piano lessons with Golding.

He was also explicit about problems with his parents, and suggested that the girl he tried to rape had later plotted to get his father, a grammar school teacher in Marlborough, to watch them having sex in a field through binoculars.Ĭarey outlined his findings in the Sunday Times, for which he is the chief reviewer, in advance of extracts from the biography which will be published next week. The memoir, entitled Men and Women Now, makes no attempt to hide the author's regular dependence on drink to fight his demons. The couple were married for 54 years, and Golding felt the honesty of his account would explain what he described as the 'monstrous' side of his character. The book also draws on an unpublished memoir written by Golding for his wife, Ann, who died in 1995 and is buried beside him at Salisbury, Wiltshire. John Carey, the emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford university, was given access to a personal journal kept by Golding – who carefully guarded personal information during his life – for 20 years. The revelations will appear in a forthcoming biography of the writer, who died in 1993 at the age of 81.

William golding