Amy Levy: Critical Essays

Afterword

 Afterword O Meri-Jane Rochelson I first came across Amy Levy while doing research on Israel Zangwill for a master’s essay in 1976. Intrigued by this writer whose ordinary Jewish name might have belonged to one of my high school classmates, I searched the University of Chicago stacks for a copy of Reuben Sachs or a collection of her poems. Finding nothing, I was at Wrst a bit surprised, then perturbed , and then resigned. At Chicago, one hardly ever used interlibrary loan: if it was not in the Regenstein Library, then it was not worth looking at. Amy Levy must have been, sadly, a minor writer, not very good even if she had inXuenced Zangwill. In 1976, Elaine Showalter still had not published A Literature of Their Own; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar were still working on The Madwoman in the Attic. “Jewish literary criticism” more often than not was engaged You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher.  Meri-Jane Rochelson in examining representations of Jews in the works of mainstream (mostly male) British and American writers. When, in the middle 1980s, I Wnally ordered a copy of Reuben Sachs from the interlibrary loan oYce at the university where I teach, what arrived was a photocopy of the novel that had been donated to Emory University by Linda Gertner Zatlin; no doubt it was the copy from which she had worked in producing her formative survey The Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Novel, published in 1981.The work of recovery that began with these studies and others—which led to important editions of Levy’s work by Melvyn New (1993) and Susan David Bernstein (2006), the Wne biography by Linda Hunt Beckman (2000), numerous articles on Levy’s prose and poetry, and the collection of essays at hand—startles us with the recognition of what would have been lost had this revision and expansion of literary history not taken place. Only four decades ago, the British literature considered worth reading and, perhaps more importantly, considered worth teaching was conceptualized as coming from a male, Christian tradition; the experience worth examining through Wction, poetry, and drama was the experience of Christian men with longstanding roots in the United Kingdom—or, as in the ambiguous cases of Henry James,T. S. Eliot, and Joseph Conrad, of Christian men who could effectively simulate such roots.The situation in America was not much diVerent, with the exception that twentieth-century Jewish literature by men had gained recognition in the works of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Joseph Heller. Only recently have nineteenth-century poets and Wction writers such as Emma Lazarus, Mary Antin, and AnziaYezierska been given their due (along with Abraham Cahan, whose stories of turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrant culture had for years been neglected) and the signiWcance of Jewishness recognized in the work of such contemporary women authors as Erica Jong, Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, and Dara Horn and, in Britain, Elaine Feinstein, Eva Figes, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, among many others writing in English in the twentieth century and today. But this recognition is a relatively new development. Amy Levy, as woman and Jew, was doubly marginalized in British literary studies until the late twentieth century, when scholars who saw the signiWcance of marginal writers, particularly in the longoverlooked late Victorian era, ensured that her work was discussed, analyzed, and reintroduced to readers. Just pulling two books oV my shelf, I Wnd eleven of Levy’s poems and one of her essays reprinted in The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and PoeticTheory (1999) and her poetry considered in two essays in You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher.  afterword The Cambridge Companion toVictorian Poetry (2000).Today Amy Levy, the outsider, is part of the mainstream. The present volume draws on the fact that Levy’s work is now available to a wide range of readers and considered integral toVictorian studies, even as it acknowledges the ways in which her centrality resides in her marginal position. Particularly compelling is the way we are invited to view Levy as not peripheral but representative of young women intellectuals and writers of her...