To be damned by the devil is to be truly blessed.

Robert Bielak, 1946 –
Arthur Quiller-Couch biography at QuotationFun

A Short Biography of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

Author Name:

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

Born As:

Arthur Quiller-Couch

Other Names:

Q.

Born:

21 Nov 1863

Died:

12 May 1944




author picture 
Writer                          
Selected works:

Fiction:

Dead Man's Rock - 1887
Troy Town - 1888
The Splendid Spur - 1889
The Blue Pavilions - 1891
St Ives - 1898, completing an unfinished novel by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Ship of Stars - 1899
Hetty Wesley - 1903
The Adventures of Harry Revel - 1903
Fort Amity - 1904
The Shining Ferry - 1905
Sir John Constantine - 1906

A collected edition of Q's fiction appeared as 'Tales and Romances - 30 volumes, 1928–29

Verse:

Green Bays - 1893
Poems and Ballads - 1896

Criticism and anthologies:

Adventures in Criticism - 1896
The Golden Pomp, - 1895
Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1900 - 1900
The Sleeping Beauty and other Fairy Tales from the Old French - 1910
Studies in Literature - 1918
On the Art of Reading - 1920
On the Art of Writing
Oxford Book of English Prose - 1923
[edit]Autobiography
Memories and Opinions - unfinished, published 1945.                          
                          
Primarily remembered for the monumental Oxford Book Of English Verse 1250–1900, later extended to 1918.

Knighted in 1910, Quiller-Couch was made a Bard of Gorseth Kernow in 1928, taking the Bardic name Marghak Cough - 'Red Knight', and was Commodore of the Royal Fowey Yacht Club from 1911 until his death.                          
His Book of English Verse is oft-quoted by John Mortimer's fictional character Horace Rumpole.

Castle Dor, a retelling of the Tristan and Iseult myth in modern circumstances, was left unfinished at Quiller-Couch's death and was completed many years later by Daphne du Maurier. As she wrote in the Sunday Telegraph on April 1962, she took up the job with considerable trepidation, at the request of Quiller-Couch's daughter and "in memory of happy evenings long ago when 'Q' was host at Sunday supper".

He features as a main character, played by Leo McKern, in the 1991 BBC TV feature, The Last Romantics. The story focuses on his relationship with his protegé, F. R. Leavis and the students.

His Cambridge inaugural lecture series, published as On the Art of Writing, is the source of the popular writers' adage "murder your darlings.