Q.D. Leavis

Queenie Dorothy Leavis (née Roth, 7 December 1906 – 17 March 1981) was an English literary critic and essayist.

Born in Edmonton, England, Queenie Leavis came from a Jewish family; her marriage to her Gentile husband F. R. Leavis caused a permanent rift with her relatives.

Her Ph.D thesis, published under the supervision of I. A. Richards, became the book Fiction And The Reading Public (1932). Fiction and the Reading Public was influenced by Robert and Helen Lynd's book Middletown, the work of the anthropologist A. C. Haddon, and Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War by Wilfred Trotter. It sought to account for what Leavis regarded as the cultural decline of literary standards by surveying the marketing of modern fiction. Queenie Leavis regarded modern literature as largely inferior to "unitary" literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She wrote about the historical sociology of reading and the development of the English, the European, and the American novel. She paid particular attention to the writings of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Herman Melville, the Brontës, Edith Wharton and Charles Dickens.

Dr Leavis was noted for scrupulous detail in her research, but also for being sometimes irrationally pertinacious in the maintenance of her opinions. An example was the experience of her one-time pupil Valerie Grosvenor Myer, who came up to Cambridge as a Mature Student and was taught by Dr Q Leavis in her final year. In a supervision on Hardy's Jude the Obscure, as Dr Leavis held forth on the virtues of the organic community (an article of faith among the Scrutiny set), her student Mrs Grosvenor Myer, who had been brought up in a remote part of the Forest of Dean, commented that such communities could have their drawbacks. "I grew up till the age of 19 in a house without electricity or indoor sanitation," she pointed out. "Nonsense, dear," rejoined Dr Leavis in not-to-be-contradicted tones; "you're much too young!"

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