Irreverently and chauvinistically, Mrs Leavis was usually referred to by our group as Queenie. In spite of the Q. D. Leavis which appeared on her books (the D standing for Dorothy), I thought for years that this involved an abbreviation or sobriquet of some kind. Only much later did I come across John Osborne's references to his Aunt Queenie and realise that the name was one actually given to some girls by their parents around the beginning of the last century. Much as I enjoyed being taught by her husband, I cannot say the same for her. She had been very ill when I first arrived at Downing and had been forced to go through several gruelling operations, followed by even more gruelling treatments, so that she only reappeared as a supervisor in my last year. I was sent to her along with a fellow student in my group called John Wiltshire, the author subsequently of excellent books on Dr Johnson and Jane Austen. I assume the topic was nineteenth-century fiction, since that was her speciality, but I cannot remember anything at all about the supervisions beyond the fact that Mrs Leavis was dissatisfied with our performance. The reason I know this is that one of the other supervisors casually remarked one day that she felt Wiltshire and I corresponded closely to Sir James Chetham, as he is described in the second chapter of Middlemarch. This was a novel we all knew well so that I had no difficulty in going to the exact sentences she clearly had in mind. They are quoted by Leavis in The Great Tradition and occur when Sir James is contemplating marriage to Dorothea, even though she is a girl who is clearly much cleverer than he is: