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.
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...
Education
Constance Garnett
Following her mother's death, Constance was sent to Brighton High School
, a boarding school where she was forced to sleep by herself since she refused to say prayers at night. There she continued studying...
Education
Elaine Feinstein
She later felt she was lucky to be a postwar student; before then, she would have been as out of place at Newnham as Amy Levy
. Christianity was everywhere
Feinstein, Elaine. It Goes with the Territory. Alma.
One of her travelling companions (and a close friend) was the New Woman novelist Mona Caird
(famous for her declaration calling the institution of marriage a vexatious failure in the Westminster Review in 1888).
Thesing, William B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 199. Gale Research.
38
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
Friends, Associates
Clementina Black
Besides her friendship with Eleanor MarxCB
became close friends with Amy Levy
, whom she met in London in the late 1870s. She introduced Levy's work Xantippe to publishers.
Cameron, Mary. “Clementina Black: A Character Sketch”. The Young Woman, Vol.
1
, pp. 315-16.
315
When Levy committed suicide...
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
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
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...
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...
