Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, commonly known as "Q," the initial with which he signed many of his works, was a reformer and reform writer primarily in working to improve secondary education in Cornwall and in contributing to the reform of the study of English at Cambridge University in the 1910s and 1920s. "Cambridge English," a movement in literary criticism associated with William Empson, Mansfield Forbes, I. A. Richards, and F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, was partly Q's creation. It strongly influenced the study of English in universities throughout the world. Quiller-Couch was an anthologist, educationist, critic, scholar, and poet who initially made his reputation as a short-story writer and novelist in the 1890s and the early twentieth century.
Born in Bodmin, Cornwall, in 1863, Q was the eldest of five children of Mary Ford and Dr. Thomas Quiller-Couch, the local physician. From Q's father and paternal grandfather, Jonathan Couch, author of the four-volume A History of the Fishes of the British Islands (1862-1865) and the leading ichthyologist of his day, Q acquired his interest in writing.
