Amy Levy

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Standard Name: Levy, Amy
Birth Name: Amy Levy
Pseudonym: Melissa
Pseudonym: A Maiden Aunt
AL was a precocious writer who died (in 1889) so young that all her work might in other circumstances be classed as juvenilia. She is a remarkable poet, melancholy but forceful and individual. Some of her short stories and essays, and one of her three novels, fall into her own categorization of pot-boilers; in others her artistic purpose is paramount. She was also a translator of German poetry. She is a writer of the urban and the modern, whose work is given extra interest by its sometimes painful engagement with her Jewish identity and with the position of Jews in the world of the English intelligentsia.
Black and white photograph of Amy Levy, shown from the shoulders up. She is wearing a dark dress with a light lacy collar, and her dark hair is pulled back.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Travel Clementina Black
CB and Amy Levy travelled to Italy some time in 1881 or 1882.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
55
Travel Clementina Black
In poor health, CB spent the autumn with a friend in Switzerland and then travelled to Florence with Amy Levy .
Glage, Liselotte. Clementina Black: A Study in Social History and Literature. Carl Winter.
21
Textual Production Rosamund Marriott Watson
By the late 1880s she was successfully publishing in several periodicals. Over the next years, she contributed reviews, poems, and articles to a wide range of publications (both at home and abroad), including Longman's...
Textual Production Rosamund Marriott Watson
RMW was by this time establishing a name for herself as an poet. In 1890 Elizabeth A. Sharp included three of her poems in Women Poets of the Victorian Era. The anthology also features...
Textual Production Oscar Wilde
Wilde shifted the magazine's focus from fashion and transformed it into an organ for women's opinions and feelings on the subjects of modern life, art, and literature, as well as style. He was also dedicated...
Textual Production Harriett Jay
Charles Marlowe's (HJ 's) and Robert Buchanan 's co-written comedy Shopwalker opened at the Vaudeville Theatre in London (where Jay had often acted), and it did well.
The title is sometimes given as...
Textual Features Rosamund Marriott Watson
Of the Earth, Earthy is one of RMW 's many works dedicated to city life. Hughes suggests that Amy Levy (particularly through A London Plane-Tree) and Charles Baudelaire influenced this poem.
Hughes, Linda K. “Feminizing Decadence: Poems by ’Graham R. Tomson’”. Women and British Aestheticism, edited by Talia Schaffer et al., University Press of Virginia, pp. 119-38.
121
RMW writes:...
Reception Grace Aguilar
It is hard to trace influence among nineteenth-century Jewish women writers; this early piece of domestic realism presages the work of Amy Levy in Reuben Sachs, but Levy seems to have had no knowledge...
Literary responses Constance Naden
George Saintsbury , writing in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, grouped CN as a poet with Mathilde Blind , Amy Levy , and Michael Field . He called her writing a...
Literary responses Sappho
This inspired, among others, Amy Levy ,
Gubar, Susan. “Multiple personality”. Women’s Review of Books, Vol.
xviii
, No. 12, pp. 13-14.
13
Michael Field , Natalie Barney , Renée Vivien , and Colette .
Literary responses Laurence Alma-Tadema
Amy Levy , who was deeply impressed by LAT 's appearance and presence, paid Love's Martyr a back-handed compliment: I think more of her book now that I have seen her.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
261 and n4
The...
Intertextuality and Influence Beatrice Harraden
The epigraph, she said, came from an (unidentified) old English author.
Galbraith,. “Things Literary in London Gossip”. New York Times.
It reads (slightly differently rendered in different versions): And there was moche playe and entreplaye of musick, divers instrumentys makyng mynstralsy with eche other...
Intertextuality and Influence Charlotte Montefiore
In an article in the Jewish Chronicle two years afterCM died, Abraham Benisch wrote in praise of nineteenth-century Jewish women writers. He asserted that it is a remarkable phenomenon on the horizon of Anglo-Jewish...
Intertextuality and Influence Louisa May Alcott
Following her death, G. K. Chesterton in a laudatory (if sexist) review classed LMA with Austen as an early realist, and praised her apt depictions of human truths.
Chesterton, G. K. “Louisa Alcott”. Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott, edited by Madeleine B. Stern, G. K. Hall, pp. 212-14.
213-14
She was a favourite writer...
Intertextuality and Influence Percy Bysshe Shelley
For generations PBS appeared the quintessential image of the Romantic poet, whose work influenced such poets as Mathilde Blind , Amy Levy , Alice Meynell , Sarojini Naidu —though for some of them he was...

Timeline

2 May 1857: A grand dome designed by Panizzi was opened...

Building item

2 May 1857

A grand dome designed by Panizzi was opened in what had been the central courtyard of the British Museum .

Texts

Levy, Amy. A London Plane-Tree. T. Fisher Unwin, 1889.
Levy, Amy. A Minor Poet. T. Fisher Unwin, 1884.
Levy, Amy. Miss Meredith. Hodder and Stoughton, 1889.
Levy, Amy. Reuben Sachs. Macmillan, 1889.
Levy, Amy. Reuben Sachs. Editor Bernstein, Susan David, Broadview Press, 2006.
Levy, Amy. The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, 1861-1889. Editor New, Melvyn, University Press of Florida, 1993.
Levy, Amy. The Romance of a Shop. T. Fisher Unwin, 1888.
Levy, Amy. Xantippe. E. Johnson, 1881.