The person who described Fiction and the Reading Public as causing ‘something of a sensation’ was a Cambridge lecturer called F. L. Lucas. For him, the book was full of ‘angry arrogance’ and a symptom of the unfortunate emphasis on criticism in the teaching of English at Cambridge. ‘The more I see, in education, of Criticism in its ordinary sense of judging books – what the elect call “evaluation”’, he wrote, in a manifestation of fellow feeling with the Oxford don who had rebuked Robert Graves, ‘the more I doubt its use’. He complained that what Mrs Leavis's denunciation of the popular culture of her day heralded was a new Puritanism and, classically trained himself, rather weakened his proposals for changes to the Cambridge English Tripos by confessing he could see nothing in it that could compare to Classics ‘as education’. ‘The study of its two literatures is saved from the effeminacy of many aesthetic pursuits by its linguistic difficulty’, this former Rugby schoolboy elaborated, ‘from muddle-headedness by the clarity of the classical mind, from critical crazes by its remoteness’. By the time he wrote these strange words Lucas was a fellow of King's and an intimate of Woolf and the Bloomsbury group. The hostility between these people and the Leavises was sociological as well as ideological, as much a matter (that is) of class as of differing views. As the remark about not knowing which end of the cradle to stir indicates, the review of Three Guineas is not so much an attack on Woolf as a feminist, but rather as an over-privileged woman insulated from the realities of the world by her class, and therefore incapable of commenting sensibly on them. It is written from the perspective of a double outsider, someone who not only came from a relatively modest social background but who was also Jewish. Queenie Roth was Mrs Leavis's name before she married. Because of his own last name, Leavis himself was also thought to be Jewish, especially by an unpleasant variety of his enemies. But if he had have been, Queenie's parents would have had no reason to cut her off completely when she married him. The quarrel was bitter and, although the claim has been disputed, she is reputed never to have seen her mother again.