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
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...
Friends, Associates Beatrice Webb
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...
Friends, Associates Rosamund Marriott Watson
She forged friendships with other women writers, including Mona Caird , E. Nesbit , Mathilde Blind , Amy Levy , and Alice Meynell . She was also a friend of William Sharp , Austin Dobson
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 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:...
Friends, Associates Katharine Tynan
Other women writers present at the meeting were Amy Levy , Mathilde Blind , Clementina Black , and Graham Tomson (later Rosamund Marriott Watson) .
Tynan, Katharine. Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences. Smith, Elder.
331
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
Friends, Associates Vernon Lee
The young poet Amy Levy was a guest at the Florence home of VL ; Levy was at once emotionally drawn to Lee.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
119
Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. University of Virginia Press.
119
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Levy
Cultural formation Vernon Lee
As early as 24 August 1887 VL was calling Kit her new love, or new life (adapting the title of a poem which had been written for Lee by Amy Levy ).
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
148
The two...
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...

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.