Arthur Quiller-Couch

Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (21 November 1863 - 12 May 1944) was a Cornish writer, who published under the pen name of Q. 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.

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

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. 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 an equally successful Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900 (1900). (Later editions of this extended the period covered up to 1918.)

Quiller-Couch was made a Bard of Gorseth Kernow in 1928, taking the Bardic name Marghak Cough ('Red Knight').

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)
In Cornwall he was an active worker in politics for the Liberal Party. He was knighted in 1910, also that year publishing 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, with Dover Wilson.

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

In addition, Quiller-Couch was Commodore of the Royal Fowey Yacht Club from 1911 until his death. His Book of English Verse is oft-quoted by John Mortimer's fictional character Horace Rumpole.

His sisters Florence Mabel and Lilian also wrote.

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" (Sunday Telegraph article published as introduction to the 1979 edition).

A brief essay on Quiller-Couch's 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).

Contents [hide]
1 Literature
2 External links
3 References
4 Footnotes



[edit] Literature
Poets of the Younger Generation (New York, 1902) William Archer

[edit] External links
In Powder and Crinoline by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
The Sleeping Beauty and other Fairy Tales From the Old French by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
On the Art of Writing
Arthur Quiller-Couch Collection at Bartleby.com
Works by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch at Project Gutenberg

[edit] References
Arthur Quiller-Couch, a Biographical Study of Q (1947) Frederick Brittain
Quiller Couch: A Portrait of "Q" (1988) A.L. Rowse