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.