Time and Memory in Amy Levy's Collegiate Writing: "My Present Mind"

There has been renewed interest in Amy Levy. What has yet to be considered is her writing in relation to women's late-nineteenth-century collegiate experience, surprising given her historic reputation as one of the first Jewish women to matriculate at Newnham College and the second at Cambridge. In her collegiate writing, Levy develops a voice that mediates the passage of historical time and the development of memory, one concerned not with the past in isolation but with the relationship between the past and the present, a "present mind" that distinguishes Levy's collegiate writing from popular college fiction of the same period. This article situates her representation of women's university experience within the broader conventions of women's collegiate fiction at the end of the nineteenth century, focusing on "Between Two Stools" as the clearest example of her conceptualization and representation of how women's university experience differs from contemporaneous writing on the subject.