This third volume of Q. D. Leavis's essays brings together pieces on hitherto unexplored aspects of Victorian literature. Most of these date from towards the end of her life and are previously unpublished. There are also essays and reviews which appeared originally in Scrutiny. Mrs Leavis focuses on the novel of religious controversy, the Anglo-Irish novel, women writers of the nineteenth century, and certain aspects of George Eliot's work. She examines these, and other relevant writing, from literary, historical and sociological points of view. The volume affords valuable new insights into nineteenth-century literature, and affirms Mrs Leavis's standing as a pioneering and penetrating critic.

Q. D. Leavis was one of the finest critics of the novel. Her published essays appeared as articles and reviews of remarkable trenchancy in Scrutiny (of which she was effectively co-editor with her husband F. R. Leavis), or as lectures or as introductions to editions of classic novels. Now, for the first time, they have been collected and reprinted in three volumes. This volume collects her lecture 'The American Novel'; essays and lectures on Henry James, Hawthorne, Melville, and Edith Wharton; and the lectures 'The French Novel', 'The Russian Novel', and 'The Italian Novel'. There is an introduction by the editor, Professor G. Singh. All the essays are informed by that broad 'sociological' view of literature that caused Q. D. Leavis to ask how the novel rose and why it flourished.

Queenie Dorothy Leavis was one of the best critics of the novel. Her primary interest was in the English novel in its greatest period the nineteenth-century, but she had wide interests and wrote on the American novel as well; and her anthropological view of literature caused her to ask how the novel rose and why it flourished and that occasioned her to look at European literatures. Her published essays appeared as articles or reviews of remarkable trenchancy in Scrutiny, or as lectures or introductions to editions of classic novels. They have been much read but she never collected them in her lifetime. They are here reprinted in three volumes. The whole is prefaced by her own 'A Glance Backward, 1965' concerning her life and work and there is an introduction by the editor, Professor G. Singh.

‘God gave her to me because you turned your back upon her, and He looks upon her as mine: you’ve no right to her!’

Wrongly accused of theft and exiled from a religious community many years before, the embittered weaver Silas Marner lives alone in Raveloe, living only for work and his precious hoard of money. But when his money is stolen and an orphaned child finds her way into his house, Silas is given the chance to transform his life. His fate, and that of the little girl he adopts, is entwined with Godfrey Cass, son of the village Squire, who, like Silas, is trapped by his past. Silas Marner, George Eliot’s favourite of her novels, combines humour, rich symbolism and pointed social criticism to create an unsentimental but affectionate portrait of rural life.

The text uses the Cabinet edition, revised by George Eliot in 1878. David Carroll’s introduction is accompanied by the original Penguin Classics introduction by Q. D. Leavis.