Amy Levy: Life & Letters

Book Reviews Amy Levy: Life & Letters Linda Hunt Beckman. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. xvi + 331 pp. Cloth $49.95 Paper $24.95 "ONLY CONNECT" seems an apt epigraph for any biographical study of the late-Victorian woman of letters, Amy Levy. Levy found connections painfully elusive. Expecting life to offer exhilarating fulfilment as woman and artist, she was disappointed by unrequited romantic attachments and forced to acknowledge the literary marketplace as well as the muse. Yearning for acceptance, she alienated the Jewish community of which she was a part by anti-Semitic critiques (and vicious caricatures in her private correspondence). Levy was depressed by her failure to make something special out of her life and tormented by feelings of self-loathing and displacement. Her despairing sense of selfdivision ended in suicide at the age of 28. Linda Hunt Beckman's thoughtful new portrait of this talented poet, novelist and essayist draws out such contradictions at the core of Levy's tragically short life and fascinating work. Yet Beckman also aims to give that life and writing prominence, coherence and meaning by exploring some of the connections inherent in Levy's "triple marginality" as woman, Jew and lesbian. Despite recent scholarly access to Levy's manuscripts and letters (a significant number of which are annotated in an appendix to this volume), Levy has remained until now a somewhat opaque and fragmented figure. Building on Martyn New's edited The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy (1993) and examining new material he omitted, Beckman works doggedly to map her subject 's psychic themes and artistic purposes. Even if she does not wholly succeed in accounting for Levy's multiple and inconsistent images of self, she does make a robust defence of her literary quality and cultural significance at the moment when Victorians turned to face modernity. Beckman neatly dismisses the main Levy myths as products of twentieth-century stereotyping of Jews and Victorian culture. Levy was not a factory girl who died tragically in a garret (Jew as deprived immigrant ); nor did she cut a mysterious and exotic dash (Jew as foreigner); nor did she campaign on behalf of Socialism and sexual liberation (the myth of the advanced radical woman of the 1880s); nor was she op65 ELT 45 : 1 2002 pressed by and tied to the family home (the archetypal dutiful Victorian single daughter). Instead, Levy emerges in the 1860s and 1870s as a lively youngster in a comfortable and affectionate middle-class AngloJewish home. Evidence indicates her family was intellectually inclined and socially assimilated, at ease in both the Jewish community and gentile society (the children even had a gentile governess). They embraced advanced social thinking and encouraged their precocious daughter. Amy attended the progressive feminist Brighton High School for Girls and went on to Newnham College, Cambridge. At both institutions she was motivated by—and even had unrequited crushes on—strong, selfsufficient , well-educated women with interests beyond romance and the marriage market. The construction of Levy as a radical feminist "pioneer" is one of the key themes developed by Beckman. Newnham was only the second college at Cambridge to admit women and Levy was only the second Jewish female student to attend Cambridge. The academic environment was liberating and exhilarating, and suited Levy's personal commitment to equality of opportunities for women. She made deep friendships there, and these in turn helped her to establish further networks of intellectual and literary companions, both male and female. The same independent confidence needed for study in Cambridge amidst male academic hostility is seen throughout Levy's public and private life after University, travelling freely alone or with female friends on the Continent, maintaining connections to intellectual London through artistic and political discussion clubs (where she met such figures as Shaw, Wilde, Yeats, and Hardy), or reading and writing in the British Museum Reading Room (where she established links with female social reformers like Eleanor Marx, Beatrice Potter Webb, and Olive Schreiner). Nonetheless, in this feminist persona there are certainly disconnections . Levy left Cambridge after her second year for reasons which are unclear. Beckman speculates on possible causes ranging from severe breakdown...