F. R. Leavis

At Cambridge she was influenced by F. R. Leavis . He, she later said, was very proud of himself and sure that he was right and everybody else was wrong; but he was also...

One of her teachers was F. R. Leavis . She continued acting as an undergraduate, primarily in tragic roles. At this time she hardly ever read a newspaper.

Then, during the years 1924-7, EJ studied at Newnham College, Cambridge . She realised the value of this education at the time, but not so profoundly as she did later. She received her BA...

Two of her contemporaries as undergraduates were Muriel Bradbrook (at Girton) and William Empson (whom her future husband, F. R. Leavis , came to admire especially).

At the beginning of her last year as an undergraduate, Queenie Roth (later QDL ) met her future husband, Cambridge don and critic F. R. Leavis , at a Girton College tea.

Q. D. Roth and F. R. Leavis were married, having been engaged since February of this year. Their first of several homes, christened The Criticastery, was in Leys Road, Cambridge.

QDL delivered her first child, a son named Ralph . She and F. R. Leavis had two other children: Katharine Laura , born in September 1939, and Lawrence Robin , born in December 1944.

F. R. Leavis continued to be productive until his eighty-second year, when he began to experience black-outs. Despite her own fragile health, QDL was her husband's primary caregiver (with some help from their daughter Kate)...

F. R. Leavis , husband of QDL , died after nearly fifty years of marriage and nearly a year of suffering from black-outs, exhaustion and sad loss of reason.

She said later that she chose medieval literature because she wanted freedom from the dictates of F. R. Leavis , freedom to read the modernists without developing critical ideas about them.

MG gives a very funny account of being interviewed for a place at Cambridge by Queenie Leavis , whose name she did not recognise, and talking confidently about Keats in ignorance of the way F. R. Leavis

At this time Queenie was a member of the JewishStudents' Society . She ate kosher food sent from home, and with her friend Sophie Baron , she attended services at the Thompson's Lane synagogue. Her...

QDL lived all of her life in London and Cambridge. Herself of Jewish, Polish, and German heritage, she was intensely concerned with English writers, readers, and notions of Englishness. She had a lasting...