Q D Leavis

Q. D. Leavis (Queenie Dorothy Leavis), 1906-81, British literary critic; wife of F. R. Leavis . After studying at Cambridge, she wrote Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), which analyzed the market for different types of fiction among readers). Her essays on Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and other women writers were published posthumously in The Collected Essays (1983).

Leavis, Queenie (Dorothy), née Roth (1906–81), scholar and critic, educated at Girton College, Cambridge. She married F. R. Leavis in 1929, and they worked for many years together in close partnership. Her influential and pioneering study, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), which originated in a thesis under the supervision of I. A. Richards, is an ‘anthropological’ investigation of the changes in reading habits since the 18th cent., and their connection with lending libraries, book clubs, mass culture, film, film novelizations, and the state of literary journalism. She collaborated with Leavis and Denys Thomson in Culture and Environment (1933), and worked from 1932 to 1953 as a sub-editor for Scrutiny. She also collaborated with her husband in their book on Dickens, Dickens the Novelist (1970), and after his death continued to write and to lecture extensively.