Volume 44, Number 11 · June 26, 1997
Lessons of an Immoderate Master
By John Gross
F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism
by Ian MacKillop
St. Martin's, 476 pp., $35.00
F.R. Leavis: A Literary Biography
by G. Singh
Duckworth, 300 pp., £35.00
Few critics are accorded the compliment of a biography; very few indeed can ever have been accorded the compliment of two, as F.R. Leavis has been in the UK—one following the other in quick succession. But then Leavis was not as other critics. He was a guru, a leader, a master of those who know; he was also, in his time, a major hate figure. One way or another, he succeeded in obsessing a large number of people; and although, nearly twenty years after his death, the passions he aroused have inevitably subsided, they are by no means extinct.
Review, 5995 words
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