Victorian Studies

Victorian Studies 44.1 (2001) 151-153

Book Review

Amy Levy:
Her Life and Letters

Amy Levy (1861-1889) is no longer known best for her essays and novellas such as "The Jew in Fiction" (1886) or Reuben Sachs (1889), but has increasingly received attention for her poetry. Earlier works by scholars such as Beth Zion Lask, S. A. Levy, Elaine Showalter, Bryan Cheyette, and Deborah Nord have acknowledged Levy as part of an important network of Anglo-Jewish, feminist writers. In 1993, with Melvyn New's edition of her selected works, Levy emerged as one of the more interesting women writers of the fin de siècle. Her poems are currently available in recent anthologies and on the internet as part of the Victorian Women Writer's Project of Indiana University and an Amy Levy Web Project. Now Linda Hunt Beckman offers not only a scholarly and sensitive biography, but also Levy's extant letters.

A suicide at the age of twenty-seven, Amy Levy was cremated by her own request. The Jewish Chronicle of 20 September 1889 reports that, unlike in the case of Mr. Camillo Roth, "in the case of Miss Levy the body remained in the coffin" (7). Sacred in Judaism, the body is to be cleansed, not put on view, and buried as quickly as possible. Cremation is highly unusual, though done by request. Presumably, Levy's body, washed first by women, remained in the coffin for cremation so that it would not be seen or handled by the men who would have cremated it. In other words, the obituary writer wants to assure the Jewish community that certain halakhic (legal) strictures were enforced in spite of a suicide and cremation. This report points to central contradictions in Levy's identity, which inform critical appreciations of her life and work, including Beckman's. Levy defined herself by exclusion and by resistance; in various ways she suffered the paradoxes of life as a Jew and as a woman in late-Victorian England. [End Page 151]

Beckman is particularly sharp at bringing out the complex difficulties of these paradoxes. For Levy was in some ways privileged, in some ways ill-served, in some ways marginalized, and in other ways self-marginalizing. Steeped in Jewish culture, Levy grew up in a religiously unobservant middle-class family. As an assimilated Jew, however, she was part of a group never fully accepted. Born into an era and into an ethnic tradition prioritizing family and marriage, Levy grew up in a family atypical both in its intellectualism and in its choosing to educate not its sons but its daughters.

Beckman carefully delineates Levy's sense of her social redundancy as a brilliant but unmarried daughter and maiden aunt. She also recounts, however, Levy's sense of personal failure as an unloved woman. While at a boarding school started by feminists, Levy began the first of a series of romantic crushes on women, relationships which seem to have remained platonic or largely emotionally one-sided. Levy's lesbianism is debated, but she was clearly a homosocial lover of women who moved in feminist, bohemian circles in London and abroad. Moreover, Beckman makes a convincing case that Levy's love poetry is spoken by a woman, not a male persona, to women.

The first Jewish woman to matriculate at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1879, the talented Levy, well-read in five languages, apparently had a breakdown while there and eventually left by choice in her second year before taking the Tripos. She spent much of her remaining life continuing to write, while in the company of women friends at home or on the continent. Her letters illustrate a lively, if moody, mind marked by emotional integrity and self-parody. Like her poetry and essays, Levy's letters demonstrate a depth of perception common to those who spend life turned in on themselves with few outlets for expression but writing, melancholia, dream, and one or two...