The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy Read online

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  title : The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, 1861-1889

  author : Levy, Amy.; New, Melvyn.

  publisher : University Press of Florida

  isbn10 | asin : 081301199X

  print isbn13 : 9780813011998

  ebook isbn13 : 9780585200316

  language : English

  subject

  publication date : 1993

  lcc : PR4886.L25A6 1993eb

  ddc : 828/.809

  subject :

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  The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy 18611889

  edited by Melvyn New

  University Press of Florida

  Gainesville Tallahassee Tampa Boca Raton

  Pensacola Orlando Miami Jacksonville

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  Copyright 1993 by the Board of Regents of the State of Florida.

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  All Rights Reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Levy, Amy, 18611889.

  [Selections. 1993]

  Selected writings of Amy Levy, 18611889 / edited by

  Melvyn New.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-8130-1199-X (hard). ISBN 0-8130-1200-7 (pbk.)

  I. New, Melvyn. II. Title.

  PR4886.L25A6 1993

  828'.809dc20 92-41443

  Frontispiece. This portrait of Amy Levy first appeared with Oscar Wilde's tribute to her in Woman's World 3 (1890): 51, with the legend "From a Photograph by Montabone, Florence."

  The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprised of Florida A & M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida International University, Florida State University, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida.

  University Press of Florida

  15 Northwest 15th Street

  Gainesville, FL 32611

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  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  ix

  Introduction

  1

  Notes to the Introduction

  41

  Two Poetic Tributes to Amy Levy

  53

  A Note on the Text

  56

  Novels

  The Romance of a Shop (1888)

  59

  Reuben Sachs: A Sketch (1888)

  197

  Miss Meredith (1889)

  294

  Poetry

  From Xantippe and Other Verse (1881)

  Xantippe

  357

  A Prayer

  365

  Felo De Se

  366

  Sonnet ("Most wonderful and strange")

  367

  Run to Death

  367

  From A Minor Poet and Other Verse (1884)

  To a Dead Poet

  370

  A Minor Poet

  370

  Sinfonia Eroica

  377

  Magdalen

  378

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  The Sick Man and the Nightingale

  381

  To Death

  381

  To Lallie

  381

  A Farewell

  383

  Epitaph

  384

  From A London Plane-Tree, and Other Verse (1889)

  "London Plane-Tree"

  A London Plane-Tree

  385

  London in July

  386

  Ballade of an Omnibus

  386

  Ballade of a Special Edition

  387

  Out of Town

  388

  The Piano-Organ

  388

  London Poets

  389

  "Love, Dreams, and Death"

  On the Threshold

  390

  The Birch-Tree at Loschwitz

  390

  Borderland

  391

  At Dawn

  391

  A Reminiscence

  391

  The Sequel to "A Reminiscence"

  392

  In the Mile End Road

  393

  In September

  393

  "Moods and Thoughts"

  The Old House

  393

  Lohengrin

  394

  Alma Mater

  394

  In the Black Forest

  395

  The Last Judgment

  396

  Cambridge in the Long

  397

  To Vernon Lee

  398

  Oh, is it Love?

  398

  In the Nower

  399

  "Odds and Ends"

  A Wall Flower

  399

  The First Extra

  400

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  At a Dinner Party

  400

  Philosophy

  401

  A Game of Lawn Tennis

  402

  To E.

  402

  Miscellaneous Poetry

  A Ballad of Religion and Marriage (n.d.)

  404

  Two Translations of Jehudah Halevi (1888)

  405

  Short Fiction

  Between Two Stools (1883)

  409

  Sokratics in the Strand (1884)

  424

  The Recent Telepathic Occurrence at the British Museum (1888)

  431

  Griselda (1888)

  435

  A Slip of the Pen (1889)

  471

  Cohen of Trinity (1889)

  478

  Wise in her Generation (1890)

  486

  Essays

  James Thomson: A Minor Poet (1883)

  501

  The New School of American Fiction (1884)

  510

  The Ghetto at Florence (1886)

  518

  Jewish Humour (1886)

  521

  Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day (1886)

  525

  Jewish Children (1886)

  528

  Women and Club Life (1888)

  532

  Notes to the Text

  539

  A Chronology of Selected Writings by Amy Levy

  565

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Florida for providing an opportunity for me occasionally to escape my academic area of expertise, the English eighteenth century, with a course in Jewish fiction; perhaps Reuben Sachs can form one small part of that curriculum in the future.

  The Division of Sponsored Research at the University of Florida provided a grant in the summer of 1991 that enabled me to make significant progress on this project. Over the years, it has been a primary campus resource for research in the humanities, and I am happy to acknowledge not only this specific grant but the many times it has provided me and others with research funding from medicine and science overhead charges, a rare instance of "trickle-down" economics actually working.

  This work would not have been completed without two splendid research assistants, Renée Serowski and Veronica E. Williams
; I am happy to formalize my abiding gratitude in this manner.

  I have relied upon the eye and ear of Joan Cockrell New, herself a poet, for significant advice on Levy's poetry, although ultimately the responsibility for inclusions and exclusions must rest solely with me. As for my more general reliance upon her quick wit and astute judgment during the past thirty-five years, the responsibility is hers: "Charms strike the sight, and merit wins the soul."

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  INTRODUCTION

  Amy Levy was born in Clapham in 1861 and died by charcoal gas inhalation in 1889, two months before her twenty-eighth birthday. In taking her own life, she not only raised numerous questions about the despairs of an educated Jewish woman in late Victorian England but also put an end to a promising literary career. In her twenty-seven years she had been the first Jewish woman admitted to Newnham College, Cambridge; had published three short novels and three slim collections of poetry; and had become a contributor to several major literary magazines, including Temple Bar and The Gentleman's Magazine, as well as to the "leading and almost universally read weekly newspaper among British Jews," 1 The Jewish Chronicle. Oscar Wilde's obituary notice in Woman's World (which he founded in 1888, and to which Levy contributed poems, short stories, and essays) took particular notice of this promise cut short:

  The gifted subject of these paragraphs, whose distressing death has brought sorrow to many who knew her only from her writings was Jewish, but she gradually ceased to hold the orthodox doctrines of her nation, retaining, however, a strong race feeling. ["Xantippe" is] surely a most remarkable [poem] to be produced by a girl still at school [and] is distinguished, as nearly all Miss Levy's work is, by the qualities of sincerity, directness, and melancholy and no intelligent critic could fail to see the promise of greater things.

  Miss Levy's two novels, "The Romance of a Shop" and "Reuben Sachs," were both published last year [1888]. The first is a bright and clever story, full

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  of sparkling touches; the second is a novel that probably no other writer could have produced. Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and, above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make it, in some sort, a classic.

  To write thus at six-and-twenty is given to very few. 2

  Yet today Amy Levy is by and large unknown and unread. Christopher Ricks includes two of her poems ("Epitaph" and "On the Threshold") in The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse;3 and in 1973 AMS Press published a facsimile edition of Reuben Sachs, but it has gone out of print.4 Her other novels are exceedingly rare (indeed, the only copy of the first edition of The Romance of a Shop in the United States is in the Library of Congress and is considered too rare and fragile to lend or photocopy); and her volumes of poetry are equally difficult to secure. The only full-length modern discussion is by Edward Wagenknecht in Daughters of the Covenant (1983), a work I found useful, though somewhat dated in its interests and judgments.5

  Gail Kraidman, in her entry on Levy for the Encyclopedia of British Women Writers, suggests one possible reason for this obscurity:

  Active in radical and feminist organizations such as the Men and Women's Club, Levy was politically controversial. This and the negative feelings engendered in some quarters [i.e., in the London Jewish community] by Reuben Sachs and Cohen of Trinity may explain why her writing, which has such artistic merit, has been suppressed. Her inclusion in the DNB is testimony to the degree of excellence of her work but her exclusion from anthologies and republication lists is even more significant.6

  One need not completely share so suspicion-laden a thesis to agree with its upshot: Amy Levy's work deserves a modern audience it does not presently have.

  This collection is designed above all to rectify the unavailability of Levy's writings by offering a very generous selection of her worksall three short novels; more than half her poetry, including several of her longer works; seven short stories; and seven essays. Not all this writing is of equal quality, but I will take some pains in this introduction to explain the rationale

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  behind individual selections. In choosing to represent Levy across the wide spectrum of her genres and interests, and ranging chronologically from writings that are late-adolescent efforts to materials written just days or weeks before her suicide, I have made an obvious decision to weigh Levy's historical significance equally with whatever perception I might have as to her literary merit. At the same time, let it be noted that her poetry and fiction sparkle for me with moments of great intensity and insight on the one hand, spirited humor and satire on the other; and, more important, that I find my own best sense of her achievement in the mass rather than in the minutiae. Taken together, the Levy canon impresses me immensely with the depth of her commitments, the versatility of her talents, the breadth of her learning. I would be hard-pressed to name a Romantic or Victorian writer we read today with whom she was not familiar; and she was conversant as well with German literature (Goethe, Heine, and Schopenhauer seem to have been her favorites), sufficiently skilled in French that Richard Garnett asked her to translate Jean Baptiste Pérès's famous parody of the ''higher criticism,'' Comme quoi Napoléon n'a jamais existé, 7 and well-read in classical literature, both Greek and Latin.