To American readers the name F. R. Leavis (1895–1978) may signify little more than half-remembered phrases and controversies —the Great Tradition, the Two Cultures— now surely, it might be thought, relegated to literary history. In England, Leavis’s influence has waned but his name still evokes strong reactions, as the reviews of Ian MacKillop’s new biography show.[1] Leavis is variously described as “neurotic,” “petty,” “authoritarian,” “impossibly haughty,” exhibiting “suppressed hysteria” or “crazed paranoia”; he is mocked as “the good doctor,” surrounded by “disciples,” his life “claustrophobically book-based.” As for his critical achievements, we hear from one writer that “he was often conspicuously wrong,” from another that he made “often extraordinarily dumb judgements about fiction, such as the absurd idea that Lady Chatterley is better than Women in Love”—a valuation Leavis made in 1930 and withdrew in 1955 and again in 1961. Yet another reviewer refers to Dickens the Novelist (1970) as Leavis’s “last major work,” although there were three books left to come, all of them important. Of course, the reviewers all agree that the man they are treating with such personal contempt, patronizing distortion, and simple inaccuracy was fantasizing when he voiced the opinion that he was being misrepresented, or that some people considered themselves his enemies, or that the London literary establishment was out to get him. “They say I have persecution mania,” he remarked once. “Comes of being persecuted, you know.” An unimpeachable source.

Not that such viciousness was rare during Leavis’s lifetime. Dr.