Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Amy Levy
-
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.
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.
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Germaine de Staël
After completing this novel GS
wrote, I'd like a really big [writing] table, it seems to me I've got the right to it now.
Kobak, Annette. “Mme de Staël and Fanny Burney”. The Burney Journal, Vol.
4
, pp. 12-35.
19
Corinne was enormously influential for nineteenth-century women writers. The model...
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 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.
Beatrice Potter (the future Beatrice Webb) became a friend of Amy Levy
during the 1880s through their shared use of the ladies' lunch room at the British Museum
, where a group developed of young...
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...
