Amy Levy

Amy Levy portrait

Amy Levy (born November 10, 1861 in London , † September 10, 1889 there ) was a British author. In addition to their literary works, they made their feminist attitude and their commitment to same-sex love famous in Victorian England .

Life

Levy was born into a Jewish family in November 1861 in Clapham, a borough in south London, the second of seven children. She became interested in literature at a young age. At thirteen she wrote a review of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's feminist work Aurora Leigh, and her first poem, Ida Gray: A Story of Woman's Sacrifice , was published in Pelican feminist magazine when she was fourteen. From 1876 she attended Brighton High School in Brighton and Hove , where she met the later famous British translator Constance Garnett (then: Constance Black). Edith Creak, the headmistress, first aroused homoerotic feelings in Amy Levy. It should turn out that it wasn't a mere crush, even though the straight director wasn't dating her. Garnett and Levy became friends and exchanged in 1879 together on the Newnham College of Cambridge University . Levy was the first Jewish student to ever enroll in Cambridge.

Her first work Xantippe and Other Verse and her first prose story Mrs. Pierrepoint appeared in 1880. After it had attracted the attention of publisher Richard Garnett , who later became Constance Black's father-in-law, in 1881 , she finished her studies.

Career

Garnett reissued Xantippe and Other Verse and Amy Levy moved back to London to earn a living by writing poetry in the future. When she wasn't traveling, she lived in London at her parents' house. From 1882 she was able to establish contacts with British bohemians . Among her new acquaintances, with whom she met almost daily in the reading room of the British Museum , were Eleanor Marx , Olive Schreiner , and Beatrix Potter . In 1884 the second collection of poems, A Minor Poet and Other Verse , was published. Two years later she began to write essays on Jewish life in England and her novel Reuben Sachs (1888) was a much discussed work. However, criticism came mainly from the Jewish community, who described the book as anti-Semitic . Contemporary literary critics, on the other hand, like Melvin New, who published an anthology in 1993 with works that were previously inaccessible, emphasize the feminist rather than the ethnic character of their work. Your publisher Richard Garnett and other artists such as Oscar Wilde praised Reuben Sachs' directness . Amy Levy was also friends with the latter and published two articles in his magazine Woman's World .

Sickness and death

Despite being a successful writer and socializing in good circles, Amy Levy had suffered from depression since she was a teenager. The exact reasons for this are still unclear. On the other hand, the pessimistic attitude and themes such as death and suicide are clear in her poems.

“When first the world grew dark to me
I call'd on God, yet came not he.
Whereon, as wearier wax'd my lot,
On Love I call'd, but Love came not.
When a worse evil did infestation,
Death, on thee only did I call. "

- Amy Levy : A Cross-Road Epitaph

In the early hours of September 10, 1889, Amy Levy locked herself in an upstairs room in her parents' house and ended her life by inhaling coal smoke. Richard Garnett cited her increasing numbness and the loss of family members as possible reasons. Amy Levy lost her brother Alfred in 1887, who had syphilis . In addition, according to Garnett, Amy was always afraid of going crazy.

Publications (selection)

Volumes of poetry

• Xantippe and Other Verse (1880; reprinted 1881)
• A Minor Poet and Other Verse (1884)
• A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (1889)

prose

• Mrs. Pierrepoint (1880)
• Miss Meredith (1888)
• The Romance of a Shop (1888)
• Reuben Sachs (1888)
• Wise in Her Generation (1890)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Modern British Poetry: A Critical Anthology (edited by Louis Untermeyer) 1920, 1925, 1930 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc. (no ISBN), pp. 270-71

literature

• Melvyn New (Ed.): The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, 1861-1889 , 1993, University Press of Florida, ISBN 978-0-813-01200-1
• Linda Hunt: Amy Levy: Her Life & Letters: Her Life and Letters , 2000, Ohio University Press, ISBN 978-0-821-41330-2

Web links

• 74 poems by Amy Levy PDF (500KB)
• Richard Whittington-Egan: Amy Levy: A tragic Victorian novelist (English)
• Levy, Amy: Introduction. Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Denise Evans and Mary L. Onorato. Vol. 59. Gale Group, Inc., 1997