Miss Marjoribanks. Chronicles of Carlingford. With an Introduction by Q. D. Leavis.

London: The Zodiac Press, 1969. Cloth. Near Fine. FIRST THUS, INSCRIBED & INITIALLED BY Q. D. LEAVIS. 8vo. Attractive original mauve patterned boards, title panel blocked in blue to spine, lettered and decorated in gilt. Gentle pushing to spine ends. Inscribed in black biro by Leavis to ffep: "To Professor A. Rutherford/ With kindest regards from/ Q. D. L./ November 3, 1969." Else, clean, bright and tight. In Gordon Davey's striking illustrated dust jacket: gently toned, spine faintly sunned, creased at spine ends, small nick to head, mark to rear panel. Near fine/ very good A lovely copy of an attractive edition, uniting two eminent literary scholars at the heights of their careers; unusual inscribed. Queenie Dorothy Leavis (1906-1981) was an English literary scholar, best known for her Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) and her subsequent collaborations with her husband, F R Leavis, including co-editing and contributions to Scrutiny. A brilliant and acerbic critic, especially of the so-called second-rate, she was an expert on Jane Austen, while "herself possessing some of the directness of an early James heroine" (ODNB). In her lengthy Introduction, Leavis proposed Margaret Oliphant and her novel as "the missing link" between George Eliot and Austen: "Her Lucilla has long seemed to me a triumphant intermediary between their Emma and Dorothea, and, incidentally, more entertaining, more impressive and more likeable than either." Her passionately held dis/likes extended beyond literature: apparently, she also "had a strong visual sense, for clothes, house decoration, and book illustration". She would surely, then, have appreciated Davey's dust jacket design. Professor Andrew Rutherford (1929-1998) was a distinguished Scottish academic and university administrator. A Byron specialist, he also published on literature and war and edited seven volumes of Kipling's poetry and prose. In 1969, when Leavis inscribed this copy, he was Regius Professor of English Literature at the University of Aberdeen.