Arthur Quiller-Couch

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Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (pronounced /ˌkwɪlɚˈkuʧ/) (21 November 1863 - 12 May 1944) was a Cornish writer, who published under the pen name of Q. He is primarily remembered for the monumental "Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900" (later extended to 1918), and for his literary criticism. He guided the taste of many who never met him, including American writer Helene Hanff, author of 84 Charing Cross Road and, via his literary amanuensus John Mortimer, the putatively fictional Horace Rumpole.

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[edit] Life

Born at Bodmin in Cornwall, he was educated at Newton Abbot College, at Clifton College, and Trinity College, Oxford and later became a lecturer there. His sisters Florence and Lilian were also writers.[citation needed]

On taking his degree in 1886 he was for a short time classical lecturer at Trinity. After some journalistic experience in London, mainly as a contributor to the Speaker, in 1891 he settled at Fowey in Cornwall.

In Cornwall he was an active worker in politics for the Liberal Party. He was knighted in 1910.

Quiller-Couch was made a Bard of Gorseth Kernow in 1928, taking the Bardic name Marghak Cough ('Red Knight'). He was Commodore of the Royal Fowey Yacht Club from 1911 until his death.

[edit] Literary and academic career

While he was at Oxford he published (1887) his Dead Man's Rock (a romance in the vein of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island), and he followed this up with Troy Town (1888) and The Splendid Spur (1889).

He published in 1896 a series of critical articles, Adventures in Criticism, and in 1898 he completed Robert Louis Stevenson’s unfinished novel, St. Ives.

From his Oxford days he was known as a writer of excellent verse. With the exception of the parodies entitled Green Bays (1893), his poetical work is contained in Poems and Ballads (1896). In 1895 he published an anthology from the 16th and 17th-century English lyrists, The Golden Pomp, followed in 1900 by the evergreen Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900 (1900), which remains to this day the quintessential anthology of English poetry. (Later editions of this extended the period covered up to 1918.)

In 1910 he published The Sleeping Beauty and other Fairy Tales from the Old French.

He received a professorship of English at the University of Cambridge in 1912, which he retained for the rest of his life, later holding a Chair (or Professorship) of English. He oversaw the beginnings of the English Faculty there, an academic diplomat in a fractious community. He is sometimes regarded as the epitome of the school of English literary criticism later overthrown by F. R. Leavis.[1]

Quiller-Couch was a noted literary critic, publishing several volumes; among these are Studies in Literature (1918) and On the Art of Reading (1920). He edited a successor Oxford Book of English Prose which was published in 1923, and published the 30-volume work of fiction, Tales and Romances, in 1928-9. He also edited a number of volumes of the New Shakespeare, published by Cambridge University Press, with Dover Wilson.

He left his autobiography, Memories and Opinions, unfinished; it was nevertheless published in 1945.

[edit] Legacy

His Book of English Verse is oft-quoted by John Mortimer's fictional character Horace Rumpole.

Castle Dor, a retelling of the Tristan and Iseult myth in modern circumstances, was left unfinished at Quiller-Couch's death and was completed many years later by Daphne du Maurier. As she wrote in the Sunday Telegraph on April 1962, she took up the job with considerable trepidation, at the request of Quiller-Couch's daughter and "in memory of happy evenings long ago when 'Q' was host at Sunday supper" [2]

[edit] Works

His later novels include:

  • The Blue Pavilions (1891)
  • The Ship of Stars (1899)
  • Hetty Wesley (1903)
  • The Adventures of Harry Revel (1903)
  • Fort Amity (1904)
  • The Shining Ferry (1905)
  • Sir John Constantine (1906)

[edit] Further reading

  • Poets of the Younger Generation (New York, 1902) William Archer
  • A brief essay on his numerous ghost stories, a form to which he returned at intervals throughout his long career, may be found in S. T. Joshi's The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004).

[edit] External links

[edit] Sources

  • Arthur Quiller-Couch, a Biographical Study of Q by Frederick Brittain (1947)
  • Quiller Couch: A Portrait of "Q" by A.L. Rowse (1988)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Eagleton, Terry (1983). Literary Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd. ISBN 0 631 132597.  p 30. Eagleton contrasts the "patrician dilettantes" and "devotees of Sir Arthur Quiller Couch" [sic, no hyphen], with the "offspring of the provincial bourgeoisie" ... "entering the traditional universities for the first time". The Leavisites, says Eagleton, had not "suffered the crippling disadvantages of a purely literary education of the Quiller Couch kind".
  2. ^ Sunday Telegraph article published as introduction to the 1979 edition
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