Arthur Quiller-Couch

Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) was an English poet, novelist, critic, essayist and professor of English literature.

Born in Bodmin, Cornwall, he was educated at Newton Abbot, Clifton College and Trinity College, Oxford. He contributed to The Oxford Magazine under the pseudonym "Q". He received a second class degree in 1886 and stayed in Oxford as a lecturer in classics (1886-87).

He wrote three comic novels set in Cornwall, using the pseudonym "Q". They were The Astonishing History of Troy Town (1888) (Troy town being the town of Fowey), The Splendid Spur (1889) and The Ship of Stars (1899).

He edited the Oxford Book of English Verse (1900; 2nd ed 1939), the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1912) and other poetry anthologies, and published volumes of essays, criticism, poems and parodies, including From a Cornish Window (1906), On the Art of Writing (1916), Studies in Literature (1918) and On the Art of Reading (1920). He was general editor of the King's Treasuries of Literature (258 volumes, begun 1920), and edited with J Dover Wilson the comedies in the New Cambridge edition of Shakespeare from 1921-31.

He was knighted in 1910. He was King Edward VII professor of English literature, Cambridge, 1912-44.