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 3 BetweenTwo Stools exclusion and unfitness in amy levy’s short stories O Gail Cunningham F ollowing her submission of “The Recent Telepathic Occurrence at the British Museum” for the Wrst issue of Woman’sWorld, OscarWilde wrote to Levy, “I hope you will send me another short story. I think your method as admirable as it is unique.”1 Though Levy referred dismissively to her short stories as “potboilers,”2 Wilde’s assessment is both perceptive and accurate . The short story form seems to me to suit her as a prose writer better than the novel.The quality that, in his obituary for Levy,Wilde praised in her prose writing—her “extraordinary power of condensation”3 —can appear as mere perfunctoriness when stretched over a full-length novel, even those as brief as hers. And Harry Quilter makes an interesting point when he criticizes her novels for what he calls their “detachment of mind,” a quality he considers “the most fatal possession of the story-teller.”4 His argument is that Levy’s 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.  exclusion and unfitness in levy’s short stories novels exhibit a certain Xatness or uncertainty in their construction of narrative voice.Whereas this may create fruitful tensions in, for example, Reuben Sachs, in Miss Meredith—the work that primarily provokes Quilter’s comment—Levy’s apparent detachment from the Wrst person narrative voice can fatally undercut the novel’s emotional thrust. In her short stories, by contrast, she employs a variety of conWdently controlled narrative voices ranging from bitter cynicism through ironic detachment to elegiac lyricism. Her frequent use of the Wrst person (male as well as female) and of the epistolary form enables her to adopt a range of confessional stances that both reveal and disguise the narrator, drawing the reader into active interpretative engagement with even the most apparently slight descriptive sketches. The aspect of Levy’s short story “method” that particularly interests me here is the way she plays with issues of confession and self-revelation. Relations between narrator (or narrators), reader, and author, and between the Wctive and the real, form a recurrent feature of the stories. Levy’s devices for highlighting these relations vary. In “Between Two Stools” and “Sokratics in the Strand,” for example, she takes two conventional narrative forms—epistolary and third person omniscient—which she destabilizes by the unexpected interpolation of an unknown Wrst person narrator. In the Wrst of Nora’s eVusively emotional letters in “BetweenTwo Stools,”Levy interpolates a sudden narrative comment: “[Here follow several pages which, for the reader’s sake, we have thought best to omit.]”5 “Sokratics in the Strand” similarly contains a single intervention from an otherwise hidden narrator, though this time at the end: “Opinions diVered . . . but my own belief is . . .”6 In other stories, names or places are what provoke implicit enquiry from the reader. For example, “Cohen of Trinity,” a story whose narrator displays baZement, attraction, and repulsion toward the eponymous protagonist, would be a very diVerent story if its authorial signature did not disclose that its author (though not its narrator) is Jewish. Levy’s travel sketches are habitually narrated by and addressed to characters from Tennyson’s Princess7 but are set in locations that are identiWed within the story as not merely realistic sounding but as actually real—names and addresses of inns, for example, where she had stayed (and which in some instances still exist). Virtually all her stories are laced with quotation and reference, inviting readers to share her emotional and intellectual framework. And in “Griselda,” Levy adopts the highly unusual practice of using her own elder sister’s name for the story’s somewhat unpleasant Wctional elder sister, a device that would have carried embarrassing—even aggressive—implications to friends and family while remaining entirely opaque to most of the story’s Wrst readers. 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.  Gail Cunningham These narrative methods engage the reader in a dynamic interrogation of the relations between narrator and author, between the imaginary, the realistic, and the real. Many of the stories, in particular those relating to travels in Germany...

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