Amy Levy: Critical Essays (review)

This splendid collection of essays will contribute to the ongoing reassessment of Amy Levy as a complex and challenging writer. Readers have traditionally viewed Levy’s life and work mainly through the lens of her suicide at twenty-seven, attributed to her tragic response to identity conflicts. As editors Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman state in their introduction to the volume and Meri-Jane Rochelson confirms in her afterword, there is more to Levy than her conflicted relationship to male, heterosexual, and Christian culture, although her own recognition of her “hyphenated” existence as an Anglo-Jew and a literary woman whose most passionate relationships were with other women was undoubtedly crucial to her career (2). The essays in this collection avoid easy classifications of Levy and her work by considering multiple contexts of fin-desiècle literature and culture. The result is a rich and complex portrait of a writer who, as Rochelson so aptly puts it, might just be representative rather than marginal, and who certainly complicated her own meditation on what it means to be a minor writer.

The first two essays reassess Levy’s novel The Romance of a Shop (1888) and its depiction of professional women. In “‘We are Photographers, Not Mountebanks!’: Spectacle, Commercial Space, and the New Public Woman,” Elizabeth F. Evans explores the implications of the Lorimer sisters’ photography shop in the context of class, respectability, and women in the workplace. She offers a fascinating analysis of the “shopgirl” (which the Lorimers are not!) and the modern department store as a space that breaks down the boundaries between public and private for women consumers (27). According to Evans, Levy insists that the Lorimers’ business can balance domesticity and professionalism and that the sisters can establish their mixed identities in urban life. In “Why Wasn’t Amy Levy More of a Socialist? Levy, Clementina Black, and Liza of Lambeth,” Emma Francis provides more historical context for understanding the novel’s depiction of women and business. Francis answers the question posed in the title by distinguishing Levy’s project from that of the activist Clementina Black, Levy’s close friend and an advocate for the rights and aspirations of working-class women. Black treats working women and factory girls with greater respect than does, say, Somerset Maugham: in Liza of Lambeth (1897), for instance, Maugham sees marrying respectably as the factory girl Liza’s only possibility in life (failing that, a sexualized Liza is doomed). Francis implicitly criticizes Levy for her limited “bourgeois subjectivity” as compared to Black’s more directly feminist and socialist response (66). Perhaps a little more attention to the differences between Levy’s project as a novelist and Black’s lectures and essays would have resulted in a less critical view of Levy.

The two essays that follow, Valman’s “Amy Levy and the Literary Representation of the Jewess” and T. D. Olverson’s “‘Such Are Not Woman’s Thoughts’: Amy Levy’s ‘Xantippe’ and ‘Medea,’” contribute to our understanding of Levy’s literary and cultural contexts. Following her argument in The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (2007), Valman offers a fascinating and original view of Levy’s work as both drawing on and diverging from representations of Jews in Christian conversionist narratives. Valman reads the “suppression of female desire and intelligence” represented in Reuben Sachs (1888) as descending from the conversionist novel (103). In these novels, the redemptive potential of the Jewess is idealized at the expense of the harsh materialism and philistinism of the Jewish male. By suggesting that Judith Quixano, the beautiful Jewess who loves Reuben Sachs, could have redeemed the decadence of the Jewish race, Levy, according to Valman, both transformed the conversionist tale and demonstrated what she saw as the sad plight of British Jews. Olverson places Levy’s dramatic monologue “Xantippe” (1881) in the contexts of Levy’s classical training and feminist awareness, interpreting it as cautioning young, educated women to avoid marriage. In a reading of...