Abstract
Amy Levy has recently resurfaced in Anglo-Jewish historiography as the symbol of a commitment to the exploration of the less palatable episodes of Jewish life in Britain after emancipation. In the preface to his Modern British Jewry (1992) Geoffrey Alderman identifies Levy as his precursor, who has pioneered the kind of ‘warts and all’ narrative of Anglo-Jewry he wants to construct.2 Alderman conceives of his text as a break with previous studies, which, he claims, have idealized Anglo-Jewry. He aims instead to rewrite the history of Jewish life in Britain after 1858, with the community’s imperfections fully revealed.
Conservative in politics; conservative in religion; the Jew is no less conservative as regards his social life … when all is said, to a houghtful person thoughtfully surveying the feminine half of [Anglo-Jewish] society, the picture is depressing enough. On the one hand, he sees an ever increasing minority of eager women beating themselves in vain against the solid masonry of our ancient fortifications, long grown obsolete and of no use save as obstructions; sometimes succeeding in scaling the wall and departing, never to return, to the world beyond. On the other, a crowd of half-educated, idealess, pampered creatures, absorbed in material enjoyments; passing into aimless spinsterhood, or entering on unideal marriages; whose highest desire in life is the possession (after a husband) of a sable cloak and at least one pair of diamond earrings. Looking on them, it is perhaps hard to realize the extent of our undeveloped social resources; of the wickedness of our wilful neglects of some of the most delicately-flavoured fruits which the gods can make to grow. I for one believe that our Conservatism [sic] with regard to women, is one of the most deeply rooted, the most enduring sentiments of the race; and one that will die harder than any other; for die it must in the face of modern thought, modern liberty and above all, of modern economic pressure.
Amy Levy, ‘Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day’, Jewish Chronicle, 17 September 18861
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Amy Levy, ‘Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day’, Jewish Chronicle, 17 September 1886, p. 7, reprinted in Amy Levy, The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1993) pp. 525–7.
Geoffrey Alderman, Modern British Jewry (London: Routledge, 1992) p. viii
Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs (London: Macmillan, 1888).
The two most important studies of the impact of Levy’s writing on Anglo-Jewish cultural debates are contained in doctoral theses, Bryan Cheyette’s ‘An Overwhelming Question: Jewish Stereotyping in English Fiction 1875–1914’ (Sheffield: University of Sheffield, 1986) pp. 176–210
Sharona Anne Levy’s ‘Amy Levy: The Woman and Her Writings’ (Oxford: University of Oxford, 1989) pp. 195–238.
Kathleen Hickok, Representations of Women: Nineteenth Century British Women’s Poetry (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984)
Deborah Epstein Nord, ‘“Neither Pairs Nor Odd”: Female Community in Late Nineteenth Century London’, Signs, 15: 2 (1990) pp. 733–45
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991) p. 26
Angela Leighton, ‘“Because men made the laws”: The Fallen Woman and the Woman Poet’, in Isobel Armstrong (ed.), New Feminist Discourses (London: Routledge, 1992) pp. 342–60
Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993) pp. 318–77.
For example, Levy’s ‘Griselda’, published in Temple Bar, 84 (1888) pp. 65–96
The most famous exposition of this argument is Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men (London: Junction Books, 1981)
Jeffrey Weeks’s thesis in Coming Out: Homosexual Politics from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet, 1977).
Michael Field’, Textual Practice, 4: 2 (1990) pp. 197–212
In 1894, after Levy’s death, Eleanor Marx described her friendship with Levy to Max Beer. She reported that she often met Levy in the British Library, during a period when both were engaged in translation work, Marx of Ibsen and Levy of ‘the German poets Lenau, Heine and others…. She had a peculiar liking for Lenau, the poet of melancholy and human liberation, but her affinity was with Heine, the sublimated essence of Jewish genius.’ Max Beer, Fifty Years of International Socialism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1935) p. 72.
Amy Levy, ‘Jewish Children’, Jewish Chronicle, 5 November 1886, p. 8.
Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jezvs (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) p. 288.
Amy Levy, A Minor Poet and Other Verse (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1884).
Amy Levy, A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889).
Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) p. 2
Martha Vicinus, ‘Distance and Desire: English Boarding School Friendships 1870–1920’, in Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey, Jr (eds), Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Lesbian and Gay Past (New York: New American Library (Penguin Books), 1991) pp. 212–29.
I take my text from Robert W. Hill’s edition, Tennyson’s Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971) I, 916–23.
This text is taken from Stephen Gill’s edition, William Wordsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Francis, E. (1999). Amy Levy. In: Armstrong, I., Blain, V. (eds) Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27021-7_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27021-7_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-27023-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-27021-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)