[1] Leavis attended Latymer School, Edmonton, and in 1925 won a scholarship to study English at Girton College, Cambridge.
Fiction and the Reading Public was influenced by Robert and Helen Lynd's book Middletown, the work of the anthropologist A. C. Haddon,[1] and Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War by Wilfred Trotter.
She paid particular attention to the writings of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Herman Melville, the Brontës, Edith Wharton and Charles Dickens.
[citation needed] An example was the experience of her one-time pupil Valerie Grosvenor Myer, who entered the University of Cambridge as a mature student and was taught by Leavis in her final year.
She contributed to and supported as an editor Scrutiny (1932–1951), an influential journal that sought to promote a stringent and morally serious approach to literary criticism.