Amy Levy

-
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.

Milestones

10 November 1861

AL was born in the London district which was then known as South Lambeth (now classified as Peckham), the second of seven children.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
1, 13

April 1875

At thirteen AL published The Ballad of Ida Grey in the feminist journal The Pelican; an essay by her on Elizabeth Barrett 's Aurora Leigh had already appeared in the children's magazine Kind Words.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
18, 31n4, 277

By August 1881

AL 's first volume—or booklet—of poetry, entitled Xantippe and other Verse, was published at Cambridge by E. Johnson : she was not yet twenty.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
55-6 and n36, 278

January 1889

AL 's second and best-known novel, Reuben Sachs, appeared, bearing the date 1888.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
267

8 March 1889

AL recorded finishing her third novel, Miss Meredith, written in six weeks.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
176

May 1889

AL 's short story Cohen of Trinity appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
185-6, 280

10 September 1889

AL committed suicide at her parents' home at 7 Endsleigh Gardens, Bloomsbury, by burning charcoal in a small enclosed room, till she was asphyxiated by carbon monoxide.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
201

By 14 December 1889

AL 's previously serialised Miss Meredith (a novel centred on a woman who travels to Italy as a governess) was posthumously published in volume form.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
3242 (1889): 816
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.

Biography

Birth and Family

10 November 1861

AL was born in the London district which was then known as South Lambeth (now classified as Peckham), the second of seven children.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
1, 13

Please click on login button to check your access and/or enter your credentials. Alternatively if you don’t have access, please click on “Subscribe”.

Log inSubscribe