He failed in his attempt to force himself on the girl, identified only as Dora, whom he had met when they both had music lessons in Marlborough, Wilts.

Their violent encounter occurred two years after their first meeting, when he returned home as an 18-year-old first year undergraduate while at Brasenose College, Oxford.

Golding wrote that they went for a walk and "felt sure she wanted heavy sex, as this was visibly written on her pert, ripe and desirable mouth".

However, his advances were rejected and soon they were "wresting like enemies", as he "unhandily tried to rape her".

The girl fought him off, prompting the blunt Golding to write that he "had made such a bad hand at rape".

Giving up, he shook her and shouted: "I'm not going to hurt you."

She ran off.

When they first met Golding was a 16-year-old schoolboy at Marlborough Grammar School, where his father Alec was a science teacher.

Decades later he wrote in an unpublished memoir, Men, Women & Now, that he thought she was "beginning to burn" sexually as a 13-year-old and that by 14 she was "already sexy as an ape".

The writer recalled the rape attempt in the autobiographical account, which he wrote for his wife Ann to explain his "monstrous" character, according to The Sunday Times.

It forms part of a previously unseen archive that John Carey, professor emeritus of English literature at Oxford, has looked through...