The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy 1861-1889

Amy Levy was a talented Anglo-Jewish writer who committed suicide in 1889 at the age of 28. During her brief career she published essays, short stories, three novels and three collections of poetry, but none of them is in print today. To correct this situation and set the stage for a generous selection of her work, Melvyn New introduces Amy Levy as an unmarried Victorian woman and an urban intellectual, disillusioned by the mores of her culture, yet unable to abandon her identification with the English Jews who embodied so much of what she scorned. He reconstructs her world in 1880s England - a time when the president of the British Medical Association warned his colleagues that educated women would become "more or less sexless" - raising questions that lead to the tortured heart and mind of this "found" writer. Of the novels, "Reuben Sachs", which generated strong negative feelings in London's Jewish community, is considered one of the first realistic examinations of assimilated Jewry in 19th century England. "The Romance of a Shop" looks at working women in late Victorian society and offers a glimpse of the bohemian world of artists. The shorter fiction ranges from a story about an Anglo-Jewish Cambridge student (who commits suicide) to the portrait of a women turned bitter and cynical by the courtship rituals of the age. The selection of nearly 50 poems includes a dramatic monologue in which Socrates' "shrewish" wife explains the world from her own perspective. The essays include sketches on Jewish life in London and a blistering attack on the pomposities of Henry James and his circle.