Is everybody’s life like this? 
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
- Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters by Linda Hunt Beckman
Had Amy Levy (1861-89) never existed, contemporary criticism would have thought her up. We have been recovering women writers for three decades now, but Levy was also a Jew and probably a lesbian, as well as a feminist; and at a time like ours when ‘margins’ are central, she can be singled out for having inhabited several at once. Not only did she belong to the pioneering generation of women at Cambridge, she was the first Jew to be admitted to Newnham. She was also a precociously gifted writer, whose first volume of poetry appeared before she was twenty; and by the time of her suicide eight years later she had published three short novels, as well as a number of essays, and had just corrected the proofs of her third volume of poems.
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Ruth Bernard Yeazell is the Chace Family Professor of English at Yale. Her new book is Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel.
Other articles by this contributor:
Self-Made Man · Edith Wharton’s Domestic Arrangements
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