The completion of the publication by Cambridge University Press of the three volumes of the Collected Essays of Q. D. Leavis makes it possible to estimate the achievement of this remarkable writer.[1] Born Queenie Dorothy Roth in 1906, she came up, a brilliant reader in English, to Girton College in Cambridge in 1926; in 1929, she became engaged to her tutor F. R. Leavis. Her book Fiction and the Reading Public, a sociological anatomy of the readership of best-sellers, came out in 1932. Then, in her own words, “I spent the next twenty years in writing for and helping to edit Scrutiny, which my husband and I established to ad vance our position in the field of literary criti cism.” During the Scrutiny years, “I myself contributed pioneering essays of evaluation and elucidation on the American novelists Edith Wharton, Henry James and . . . Haw thorne, and I wrote similar studies on many English novelists, particularly Jane Austen, on whose writings I did some research result ing in a completely new account of the na ture and value of her work. In consequence, Jane Austen is no longer considered a light weight comic artist but is accepted as being a major and deeply serious novelist concerned with the complexities of living, with its pressures and menaces, in a period of social and moral change.” After the demise of Scrutinyin 1952, Q. D. Leavis wrote introduc tions to various English novels, wrote the lion’s share
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 9 Number 7, on page 22
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