Amy Levy
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Amy Levy (1861 – 1889) was a British poet and novelist.
She was born in Clapham, London into a secular Jewish family. She was educated at Brighton 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.
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, Her second novel "Reuben Sachs" (1889) was concerned with Jewish identity and mores in the England of her time (and was consequently controversial); "Reuben Sachs," her first novel "Romance of a Shop," and other writings, including the daring "Ballad of Religion and Marrriage," reveal feminist concerns. Xantippe and Other Verses (1881) includes a poem in the voice of Socrates's wife; the volume "A Minor Poet" has dramatic monologues too as well as lyric poems. Her final book of poems, "A London Plane-Tree" (1889), contains lyrics that are among the first to show the influence of French symbolism.
She travelled widely in Europe and was said to have fallen in love with Violet Paget (Vernon Lee), the fiction writer and literary theorist, who was six years older than herself.
She had suffered from depression from an early age which, together with her growing deafness, led her to commit suicide at the age of twenty-seven by inhaling carbon monoxide.
[edit] Works
- Xantippe and Other Verse (1881)
- A Minor Poet and Other Verse (1884)
- The Romance of a Shop (1888) novel
- Reuben Sachs: A Sketch(1888) novel
- A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (1889)
- Miss Meredith (1889) novel
- The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy: 1861-1889. Edited by Melvyn New
[edit] External links
- Some Amy Levy poems on Cordula's Web.
[edit] Sources
Linda Hunt Beckman, "Amy Levy: Her Life and letters," Athens: Ohio, 2000; * 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/
