Biography

Levy was born in Clapham

Clapham

Clapham is a district in south London, England, within the London Borough of Lambeth.Clapham covers the postcodes of SW4 and parts of SW9, SW8 and SW12. Clapham Common is shared with the London Borough of Wandsworth, although Lambeth has responsibility for running the common as a whole. According...

, London, the second daughter of Lewis Levy and Isobel Levin. Her Jewish family was mildly observant, but as an adult Levy no longer practised Judaism; she continued to identify with the Jews as a people.

She was educated at Brighton High School

Brighton and Hove High School

Brighton & Hove High School is an independent day school for girls aged 3 – 18 in the city of Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, England.Founded in 1876, the school has expanded from being a very small school for less than twenty pupils to its present size of taking some 700 students...

, Brighton

Brighton

Brighton is the major part of the city of Brighton and Hove in East Sussex, England on the south coast of Great Britain...

, and studied at Newnham College, Cambridge

Newnham College, Cambridge

Newnham College is a women-only constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England.The college was founded in 1871 by Henry Sidgwick, and was the second Cambridge college to admit women after Girton College...

; she was the first Jewish student at Newnham, when she arrived in 1879, but left after four terms.

Her circle of friends included Clementina Black, Dollie Radford

Dollie Radford

Caroline Maitland was an English poet and writer. She married in 1883 Ernest Radford, and wrote as Dollie Radford. They had three children, one being Maitland Radford....

, Eleanor Marx

Eleanor Marx

Jenny Julia Eleanor "Tussy" Marx , also known as Eleanor Marx Aveling, was the English-born youngest daughter of Karl Marx. She was herself a socialist activist, who sometimes worked as a literary translator...

 (daughter of Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...

), and Olive Schreiner

Olive Schreiner

Olive Schreiner was a South African author, anti-war campaigner and intellectual. She is best remembered today for her novel The Story of an African Farm which has been highly acclaimed ever since its first publication in 1883 for the bold manner in which it dealt with some of the burning issues...

. Levy wrote stories, essays, and poems for periodicals, some popular and others literary. Her writing career began early; her poem "Ida Grey" appearing in the journal the Pelican when she was only fourteen. The stories "Cohen of Trinity" and "Wise in Their Generation," both published in Oscar Wilde's magazine "Women's World," are among her best. Her second novel Reuben Sachs (1888) was concerned with Jewish identity and mores in the England of her time (and was consequently controversial); Her first novel Romance of a Shop (1888) depicts four sisters who experience the pleasures and hardships of running a business in London during the 1880s. Other writings as well, including the daring Ballad of Religion and Marriage, reveal feminist concerns. Xantippe and Other Verses (1881) includes a poem in the voice of Socrates's wife; the volume A Minor Poet and Other Verse (1884) has dramatic monologues too, as well as lyric poems. In 1886, Levy began writing a series of essays on Jewish culture and literature for the Jewish Chronicle, including The Ghetto at Florence, The Jew in Fiction, Jewish Humour and Jewish Children. Her final book of poems, A London Plane-Tree (1889), contains lyrics that are among the first to show the influence of French symbolism.

Traveling in Europe, she met Vernon Lee

Vernon Lee

Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of the British writer Violet Paget . She is remembered today primarily for her supernatural fiction and her work on aesthetics. An early follower of Walter Pater, she also wrote over a dozen volumes of essays on art, music, and travel.-Biography:She was born at Château...

 in Florence in 1886, and it has been said that she fell in love with her. Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), the fiction writer and literary theorist, was six years older, and inspired the poem To Vernon Lee.

Despite many friends and an active literary life, Levy had suffered from episodes of major depression from an early age which, together with her growing deafness, led her to commit suicide on September 10, 1889, at the age of twenty-seven, by inhaling carbon monoxide. Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

 wrote an obituary for her in Women's World in which he praised her gifts.

Works

• Xantippe and Other Verse (1881)
• A Minor Poet and Other Verse (1884)
• The Romance of a Shop (1888) novel (Republished in 2005 by Black Apollo Press
  Black Apollo Press
  Black Apollo Press is an independent publisher based in Cambridge, England. It was founded in 1995 by American writer Bob Biderman and British Baudelarian scholar, David Kelley...
  
  )
• Reuben Sachs: A Sketch (1888) (Republished in 2001 by Persephone Books
  Persephone Books
  Persephone Books is an independent publisher based in Bloomsbury, London. Founded in 1999 by Nicola Beauman, Persephone has a catalogue of 93 "neglected novels, diaries, poetry, short stories, non-fiction, biography and cookery books, mostly by women and mostly dating from the early to...
  
  )
• A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (1889)
• Miss Meredith (1889) novel
• The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy: 1861-1889

External links

• Some Amy Levy poems on Cordula's Web.
• Poems by Amy Levy
• Amy Levy - Short Bio
• MP3 recording of Levy's novel Reuben Sachs: A Sketch from Librivox.org.
• Critical analysis of Levys's work

Sources

• Linda Hunt Beckman, "Amy Levy: Her Life and letters," Athens: Ohio, 2000;
• Iveta Jusova, The New Woman and the Empire. The Ohio State University Press, 2005.
• Judith Flanders. Inside the Victorian Home: a Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006
• Susan Bernstein, ed., Reuben Sachs [with introduction and other readings by Levy and others], Broadview, 2006