Leavis, Queenie Dorothy
LEAVIS, QUEENIE DOROTHY
LEAVIS, QUEENIE DOROTHY (1906–1981), British literary scholar. Queenie Leavis, the daughter of a Jewish draper, Morris Roth, of Edmonton, London, was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, where she received a first degree and won four prizes. In 1929 she married the famous literary scholar F.R. Leavis (1895–1978). Her doctoral dissertation was published as Fiction and the Reading Public (1932). From 1932 until 1953 her husband was the editor of the famous literary quarterly Scrutiny, in which she played an influential role. She taught English at Cambridge in the 1960s and produced a steady flow of highly influential works centering around the nature of English literary identity, such as Dickens the Novelist (1970), co-authored with her husband, and essays published posthumously in three collected volumes.
bibliography:
odnb online; I. MacKillop, F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (1995).
[William D. Rubinstein (2nd ed.)]