Amy Levy

Amy Levy (10 November 1861 – 10 September 1889) was a British poet and novelist, best-remembered for her feminist positions and her engagement with homosexual romance during the Victorian era.

Biography

Levy was born in the affluent south-west district of London, Clapham, on 10 November in 1861 to Lewis and Isobel Levy. She was the second born of seven siblings in a religious Jewish family.^[1] As an adult, Levy no longer practised Judaism, but continued to identify herself as Jewish. ^{[citation needed]}

Starting at a young age, she was very interested in literature: at age 13, she wrote a criticism of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's feminist work Aurora Leigh. At 14 years of age, Levy's first poem, "Ida Grey: A Story of Woman's Sacrifice", was published in the journal Pelican. In 1876, she was sent to Brighton and Hove High School and studied at Newnham College, Cambridge; she was the first Jewish student at Newnham, when she arrived in 1879, but left after four terms without matriculating. ^{[citation needed]}

Her circle of friends included Clementina Black, Dollie Radford, Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl Marx), and Olive Schreiner. Levy wrote stories, essays, and poems for periodicals, some popular and others literary. The stories "Cohen of Trinity" and "Wise in Their Generation", both published in Oscar Wilde's magazine, Women's World, are among her most notable. Her second novel Reuben Sachs (1888), was concerned with Jewish identity and mores in the England of her time. ^{[citation needed]}

Her first novel Romance of a Shop (1888) depicts four sisters who experience the pleasures and hardships of running a business in London during the 1880s. Other writings as well, including the daring Ballad of Religion and Marriage, reveal feminist concerns. Xantippe and Other Verses (1881) includes a poem in the voice of Socrates's wife; the volume A Minor Poet and Other Verse (1884) has dramatic monologues too, as well as lyric poems. In 1886, Levy began writing a series of essays on Jewish culture and literature for the Jewish Chronicle, including The Ghetto at Florence, The Jew in Fiction, Jewish Humour and Jewish Children. Her final book of poems, A London Plane-Tree (1889), contains lyrics that are among the first to show the influence of French symbolism. ^{[citation needed]}

Traveling in Europe, she met Vernon Lee (née Violet Paget), a fiction writer and literary theorist six years Amy's senior, in Florence, Italy in 1886, and fell in love with her.^[2] Both women would go on to write works with sapphic love. Lee inspired the poem "To Vernon Lee".

Suicide

Despite many friends and an active literary life, Levy had suffered from episodes of major depression from an early age which, together with her growing deafness, led her to commit suicide "at the residence of her parents ... [at] Endsleigh Gardens"^[3] by inhaling carbon monoxide. Oscar Wilde wrote an obituary for her in Women's World in which he praised her gifts.^[4]

Works

• Xantippe and Other Verse (1881)
• A Minor Poet and Other Verse (1884)
• The Romance of a Shop (1888) novel (republished in 2005 by Black Apollo Press)
• Reuben Sachs: A Sketch (1888) (republished in 2001 by Persephone Books)
• A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (1889)
• Miss Meredith (1889; a novel)
• The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy: 1861–1889

References

Sources

• Linda Hunt Beckman, "Amy Levy: Her Life and letters," Athens: Ohio, 2000;
• Iveta Jusova, The New Woman and the Empire. The Ohio State University Press, 2005.
• Judith Flanders. Inside the Victorian Home: a Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006
• Susan Bernstein, ed., Reuben Sachs [with introduction and other readings by Levy and others], Broadview, 2006

External links

• Some Amy Levy poems on Cordula's Web.
• Poems by Amy Levy
• Amy Levy – Short Bio
• MP3 recording of Levy's novel Reuben Sachs: A Sketch from Librivox.org.
• Critical analysis of Levys's work