Q. D. Leavis

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

Life Queenie Leavis was born in Edmonton, London, to Morris Roth (1876–1953), hosier, and afterwards draper, and Jane Davis (1876–1940). She came from a Jewish family and her marriage to her Gentile husband F. R. Leavis caused a permanent rift with her relatives. She graduated in 1928 with a first-class degree with distinction in the English tripos. It sought to account for what Leavis regarded as the cultural decline of literary standards by surveying the marketing of modern fiction.

Much of her work was published collaboratively with her husband, F. R. Leavis. She contributed to and supported as an editor Scrutiny (1932–1951), an influential journal that sought to promote a stringent and morally serious approach to literary criticism.

Author and actor Stephen Fry reported that she had the reputation of being a harridan.

The mathematician Leonard Roth was her brother.

Works

Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) Lectures in America (1969, with F. R. Leavis) Dickens, the Novelist (1970, with F. R. Leavis) Collected Essays, Volume 1: The Englishness of the English Novel (1983) Collected Essays, Volume 2: The American Novel and Reflections on the European Novel (1985) Collected Essays, Volume 3: The Novel of Religious Controversy, (1989)