F. R. Leavis was born in 1895 in Cambridge, where he would live and teach for most of the rest of his life. He volunteered as a stretcher-bearer in the First World War, and was badly gassed on the Western Front. Appointed Director of Studies in English at Downing College, Cambridge, in 1930, he remained there for the next thirty years, often at odds with the University establishment. In 1932 he and his wife Queenie Roth founded the hugely influential journal Scrutiny, which ran until 1953. He was one of the most important figures in the development of modern literary criticism, and in the elevation of English as a serious academic subject. He died in 1978.
Queenie Leavis (née Roth) was born in 1990 and died in 1982. She and F. R. Leavis established a personal and intellectual partnership in 1929 that endured until his death. An editor of Scrutiny until its closure in 1953, her particular interests were in the development of the novel in the English language and in the sociology of reading and publication. The couple had two sons and a daughter.