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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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...
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...
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.