Arthur Thomas Sir Quiller-Couch

Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch ( 21 November 1863 - 12 May 1944) was a Cornish writer who published using the pseudonym Q. Although a prolific novelist, he is remembered mainly for the monumental publication The Oxford Book Of English Verse 1250-1900 (later extended to 1918) and for his literary criticism. He influenced many who never met him, including American writer Helene Hanff, author of 84, Charing Cross Road and its sequel, Q's Legacy. His Oxford Book of English Verse was a favourite of...See more

Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch ( 21 November 1863 - 12 May 1944) was a Cornish writer who published using the pseudonym Q. Although a prolific novelist, he is remembered mainly for the monumental publication The Oxford Book Of English Verse 1250-1900 (later extended to 1918) and for his literary criticism. He influenced many who never met him, including American writer Helene Hanff, author of 84, Charing Cross Road and its sequel, Q's Legacy. His Oxford Book of English Verse was a favourite of John Mortimer's fictional character Horace Rumpole. In 1887, while he was attending Oxford, he published Dead Man's Rock, a romance in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, and later Troy Town (1888), a comic novel set in a fictionalised version of his home town Fowey, and The Splendid Spur (1889). Quiller-Couch was well known for his story "The Rollcall of the Reef," based on the wreck of HMS Primrose during 1809 on the Cornish coast. He published during 1896 a series of critical articles, Adventures in Criticism, and in 1898 he published a completion of Robert Louis Stevenson's unfinished novel, St. Ives. From his Oxford time 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 lyricists, The Golden Pomp, followed in 1900 by the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900. Later editions of this extended the period of concern to 1918 and it remained the leading general anthology of English verse until Helen Gardner's New Oxford Book of English Verse appeared in 1972. In 1910 he published The Sleeping Beauty and other Fairy Tales from the Old French. He was the author of a number of popular novels with Cornish settings (collected edition as 'Tales and Romances', 30 vols. 1928-29). He was appointed King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge in 1912, and retained the chair for the rest of his life. Simultaneously he was elected to a Fellowship of Jesus College, which he held until his death. His inaugural lectures as the professor of English literature were published as the book On the Art of Writing. His rooms were on staircase C, First Court, and known as the 'Q-bicle'. He supervised the beginnings of the English Faculty there - an academic diplomat in a fractious community. See less