31. Amy Levy — Reuben Sachs with Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith

KIM: Amy, I think we’ve both read all of George Eliot and Jane Austen’s novels multiple times, but all this time we’ve been missing out on a novel that was written in response to Eliot’s Daniel Deronda by an author who has been described as the Jewish Jane Austen. How could that be? 

AMY: I know, right? How had we not heard of her? The novel we’re discussing today, Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy, was published in 1888, twelve years after Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. 

KIM: And here’s what Oscar Wilde had to say about the novel: “Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make Reuben Sachs, in some sort, a classic.” 

AMY: I mean, high praise from a man known for his brutal honesty, wouldn’t you say?

KIM: Mm-hmm. When I first picked up the Persephone edition of Reuben Sachs, I was immediately enveloped in the beauty of the language and the evocative descriptions of the characters and their surroundings. I’d even go so far as to say it was hauntingly beautiful. 

AMY: Yeah, it’s very poignant, and when we tell you more about the compelling and tragic story of its author, you’ll understand why that’s an all-too-apt description. We have a special guest on this week’s episode to give us more insight into Levy and her novel. We’ll introduce her in just a moment. As for myself, I’m Amy Helmes. 

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. Welcome back to Lost Ladies of Lit. We’ve got a really interesting show for you today, so let’s raid the stacks and get started.

[Introductory music]

AMY: Our guest today is Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith, an author, critic, and researcher based in Cambridge, England. Her articles and reviews have been published in, among other outlets, the Guardian, the Dublin Review Of Books, the Journal of Victorian Culture, and the TLS (she was featured on their cover in January 2020 for her essay on female intellectuals of the 20th century). Ann specializes in writing about and lecturing on 19th and 20th century Cambridge women, including the author we’re discussing today, Amy Levy. You can find more of Ann’s writing at her blog, Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. Welcome, Ann. We’re glad to have you on the show today. 

ANN: I’m delighted to be here, thank you.

KIM: So let’s begin our discussion by telling our listeners a little more about Amy Levy. Would you like to start us off, Amy?

AMY: Sure! So Amy Levy was born the second of eventually seven children in 1861 in Clapham, which is an affluent area of London. Her family was Jewish, although they apparently had a “casual attitude toward religious observance.” Amy showed talent and an interest in literature at an early age. She won a junior prize for a critique of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic poem Aurora Leigh when she was just thirteen. And then at fourteen, her own poem “Ida Grey: A Story of Woman’s Sacrifice” was published in a feminist journal.

KIM: Wow, precocious. She reminds me of the episode we did on Nathalia Crane, the child poet.  

AMY: Yeah. I mean, in that case, Nathalia… there’s a question of whether or not she was really writing those poems, but in this case it’s pretty clear that Levy was obviously a very intelligent young woman.  

KIM: That’s right. Anyway, Levy’s family was supportive of her education. She went to Brighton and Hove High School, a day school for girls in East Sussex. And then at 17 she began her studies at Newnham College, an all female college at Cambridge University. She was the first Jewish student at Newnham when she arrived in 1879, but she left before completing her final exams. (And a side note, at that time women could study and attend lectures with a chaperone, but they weren’t given degrees at Cambridge until 1948.) She then published three novels and lots of poetry and essays before taking her own life at age 28. So young — and we’ll talk more about that later. But I did want to note that Oscar Wilde actually wrote her obituary, which really says something about her. But let’s go back a little. Ann, can you tell us more about what is known about Levy’s time at Cambridge and why she may have left?

ANN: Sure. Well, as you said, she went to a progressive girls’ school in Brighton, and that was at a time when well-off families would usually have governesses. And with governesses, the standard could be very variable depending on how good an education they, themselves, had had. So this was a period in the 1870s when new girls’ schools started, and they very much put an emphasis on academic achievement and excellence. Some of those teachers had attended the very first women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, which were just starting, and one of them was very influential on Amy. She was a Classics teacher — she was actually the head mistress — and her name was Edith Creek. She had been at Newnham herself. She was one of, literally, the first five students at Newnham College. She was a hero to Amy, and she wanted to follow in her footsteps. In a way, she was perfect Cambridge material, because she was so bright, she was so hard-working. She was, as you say, a very early achiever in that she had already published her poetry in adult journals, which is extraordinary, I think. But then probably Newnham didn’t quite live up to her own expectations, and perhaps that did have to do with being Jewish. I think at that time, even though the family was very assimilated, a Jewish woman stood out. And she was the first Jewish woman at Cambridge, so I think she did feel a bit isolated in that regard. I got interested in her because of what I write about: the research on the first Cambridge students and the first teachers at the colleges. And she became very friendly with Ellen Wordsworth Darwin, who taught her English literature. I think they developed a close friendship and that’s what Amy enjoyed most about Cambridge, probably.

AMY: You can actually find a lot of Amy’s poems on the Internet, and there was one that she wrote about Cambridge called “Cambridge in the Long,” and it seemed to convey her conflicted feelings about being at Cambridge, whether it was homesickness or feeling like she didn’t fit in. There was a sadness to that poem in that at the very end she writes that “the pain of living is too keen.” That’s already… when she’s at Cambridge we’re already starting to see that. So she decides to leave Cambridge. She moves back into her parents’ house — they were living in Bloomsbury by this time. I think I had seen somewhere, also, that it was possible she left Cambridge just because she was ready to start her work as a writer. So maybe it had more to do with just being like, “I’m ready. I don’t see the need for this as much anymore; I’m starting to publish.”

ANN: Yeah. And I think the year that she left, 1881, is a big year in Cambridge women’s history, because that was the year they were allowed to sit the final exams, and for most of Newnham students and Girton (the other women’s college) that was a great achievement because suddenly it looked as if women were becoming equal to men. They could sit the exams; they had a right to sit the finals. But I think Amy Levy had, you know, she knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to be a writer. And to sit the final exams, you had to study mathematics, and she had no interest in having to jump through hoops and study mathematics; she wanted to do her writing, as you say.

AMY: She is a girl after my own heart if she was trying to get away from the math exams.

KIM: I know, I was thinking the same thing! If you can’t get your degree anyway, why take the exam in math? Yeah.

ANN: Yeah.

AMY: Her circle of friends, as we said, included Ellen Wordsworth Darwin. She was the daughter-in-law of Charles Darwin). Then there was Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl Marx), and Violet Paget — she was a gay writer who wrote essays on art and supernatural fiction under the name of Vernon Lee. I guess we need to add her to our episode list, because I had never read anything by her. It’s thought that Amy Levy was actually in love with her. 

KIM: Yeah, and Amy Levy first met Vernon Lee on a trip to Florence in 1886. She visited the Jewish ghetto there and it had a huge impact on her. As a result, she wrote a series of essays on Jewish culture and literature for The Jewish Chronicle, including “The Ghetto at Florence,” “The Jew in Fiction,” “Jewish Humour,” and “Jewish Children.” In her essay “The Jew in Fiction,” she criticises the treatment of Jewish characters by different novelists, including Disraeli, Dickens, and Eliot. Ann, do we know anything about how these essays were received by the Jewish community and the writing community, respectively? 

ANN: Yes, I think it’s very interesting, actually. The reason that she went to Florence was she was commissioned by The Jewish Chronicle to go there and report back and say how the Jewish ghetto (which, it was a tourist place; it was a beautiful area to visit, really), so they asked her to go. So that shows you how much trust they already had in her as a writer and that she would report back. And that was the first time, I think, that she’d written about Jewish issues, so that made her start examining how she fitted into the community as a woman. And the political situation at the time in Florence opened her eyes to women who perhaps lived life in a more unconventional way, such as Vernon Lee. Vernon Lee encouraged her to reach out a bit more with her poetry, with the themes that she tackled, to be more ambitious as a writer. And also at that time in London she was living in her parents’ house, but she was very much acting as an independent woman — going to the British Museum, meeting (as you say) Eleanor Marx, Beatrix Webb and socialists and feminists, so that was the circle she was mixing in, and she started to branch out and become more ambitious in her writing. And so, as far as I know in terms of the reception of her work at the time, the fact that The Jewish Chronicle kept commissioning her work shows that they liked it, that it went down well with their readers. So she was taking an intelligent look at their community. She wasn’t seen as somebody who was undermining any things that they felt were important at the time. 

AMY: And then it does seem that with Reuben Sachs, which we’ll be discussing, her perspective on the Jewish culture in London does get a little more complicated, I think. But let’s go back and talk about her first novel, The Romance of a Shop — that was published in 1888, and she wound up being one of twenty leading female authors who were invited to take part in the first Women’s Literary Dinner at Piccadilly, which became an annual event until 1914. And so Ann, you write a lot about the Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. Are those connected in any way?

ANN: Yeah, I like to think they are. I mean, I don’t know for sure. The Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society was a gathering of friends. They were twelve women who all knew each other mostly as the wives of male Cambridge academics. (All our academics were male). But also some of the women lecturers like Ellen Darwin, she had been a lecturer at Newnham; when she got married, she had to give up her work. But women like that, who were very intellectual but also good friends. So there were Newnham women and former students and wives who all had something in common. My feeling is that they knew what was going on in London. So I think it was a Cambridge version of the London women’s dinners. They decided that they’d have these dinners once a term. They’d discuss a set topic. I don’t know what topics they discussed, but I’m guessing they were often to do with literature and the “new woman” and issues of the day (women’s suffrage and things like that). The fact that they had these connections… (and obviously, Ellen Darwin knew Amy Levy and some of the women who were at the Piccadilly dinner.) This was very unusual; women didn’t just have dinners on their own. They always went with their husbands. You could have tea with other ladies in the afternoon, but you didn’t have an evening meal, and you certainly didn’t have an intellectual discussion, but that’s exactly what they did. So I think there was a sort of an echo between London and Cambridge at that time. Intellectual women were saying, “Look, we don’t need men to have intellectual conversations. We actually have better intellectual conversations among ourselves when we don’t have to play the part of the devoted wife and the mistress of the home,” sort of thing. So that, I think, was a nice connection. So that’s how I discovered Amy Levy, really, was that they had similar experiences with women’s clubs.

AMY: It never occurred to me that that was a novel or a sort of revolutionary sort of thing for them to be doing. And in fact, in my head, I was picturing it more as teas. I was picturing it as more of a daytime, “pretty lady,” …

KIM: Ladies who lunch.

AMY: Yeah. That’s the thought I had in my head. 

ANN: But the other funny thing is, in London, they said there were reports at the time that they were speaking to each other through a cloud of cigarette smoke. Of course, in those days, no nice lady would smoke in front of a man. They did smoke, but they would only smoke with other women. So that was a nice thing, that they could be free, they could express themselves and have a half a cigarette. That was how daring it got.

AMY: And also just to think about maybe what kind of conversations they were having about men.

ANN: Indeed.

AMY: To be a fly on the wall!

ANN: Yes, yes.

AMY: So I think this is probably a great time to begin our discussion of Reuben Sachs, which is Levy’s second novel, published in 1888 (the same year that The Romance of a Shop came out). What do you remember about first reading Reuben Sachs, and what was your initial response to it?

ANN: My initial response was how beautifully written it is. It takes you straight into the story of Reuben Sachs and his family life, and you feel the connections between all these people. It’s a little bit shocking, because she very much strikes you with a satirical component of it. She does mention Jewishness, race, the tribal community. And she’s quite funny (but in an ironic way) about the foibles of these families, that they care about money and they care about social advancement. Even Reuben Sachs, who is our hero, he’s an aspiring lawyer. At the beginning of the book, he’s had a nervous breakdown and he’s come back from six months in the Antipodes, but there is this question mark over what’s gone on. Why has he had a breakdown? And the sense is that perhaps it’s because of the social expectations that he is under. He is the “golden child” of the family. He’s expected to become an MP (a member of Parliament). He’s expected to make money. He’s expected to marry well. And all those things probably weigh on him, but in a sense, he doesn’t mind it. So it’s a funny sort of conjunction of humor, but almost with this slight bitterness to it. It’s funny. I mean, it’s funny, but it’s quite striking, with a political edge to it. It’s not something you would expect from a Victorian novel, I think. 

KIM: No, that’s absolutely right. That’s similar to what I felt when I read it for the first time, too. And I think this might be a great place to give our listeners a little overview of the plot. We’ve given them a little taste of it with a little bit about Reuben, but Amy, why don’t you give a stab at (without any spoilers) a little overview.

AMY: Okay. It’s about these two young people of marriageable age who live in London. We have the title character, Reuben, who is the scion of a wealthy Jewish family. And then there is Judith, a poor relation of his by marriage, who has been brought up by The Leunigers. They are Reuben’s rich aunt and uncle. Judith’s own family lives in a less-than-desirable neighborhood and it’s seen as a great advantage for her to be brought up alongside the rest of her cousins. So Judith and Reuben have this sort of unique opportunity to be around each other often in a casual, family setting and they are very close as you would tend to be with somebody that you’ve known your whole life. So, as Ann mentions, at the beginning of the novel, Reuben has returned from abroad — he was sent away by the family doctor to recover from nervous exhaustion caused by overwork — he has ambitions to become a member of parliament). His family, as a result, expects him to marry someone wealthy of their choosing, and they are deeply opposed to a union between Reuben and Judith even though it’s clear there is an unspoken spark between them. I’m going to read a passage from the novel… this is from Reuben’s perspective… he is thinking about Judith and trying to justify the fact that he’s sort of playing her both ways. He is enjoying their flirtation even as he also knows it can lead nowhere: 

She liked him immensely, of course, but she was unsentimental, like most women of her race, and would settle down happily-enough when the time came. He told himself these things with a secret, pleasant consciousness of a subtler element in their relationship; of unsounded depths in the nature of this girl who trusted him so completely, and whom he had so completely in hand. Nor did he hide from himself that she charmed him and pleased his taste as no other woman had ever done. A man does not so easily deceive himself in these matters, and during the last year or two he had been fully aware of a quickening in his sentiments towards her. Yes, Reuben knew by now that he was in love with Judith Quixano. The situation was full of delights, of dangers, of pains and pleasantnesses. A disturbing element in the serene course of his existence, it added a charm to existence of which he was in no haste to be rid.

KIM: In some ways it’s a typical “star-crossed lovers” plot, but one of the things that makes Reuben Sachs stand out from your standard late-Victorian novel is its feminist polemic. You can kind of see that in the passage Amy just read. I mean, it’s clear that Reuben knows that he could eventually hurt Judith, but he’s just going to do it anyway. And, even though the novel is called Reuben Sachs, I felt like, in a lot of ways, Judith was really the heroine of the book. 

AMY: Yeah, this book felt like Judith’s story, and I kept wondering why Levy didn’t use her name as the title of the book. Going into it, I thought, “Okay, this is going to be a whole novel about this man, Reuben,” when really Judith, to me, was the focus. Do you think Amy was making any sort of statement with regard to the title? Maybe this idea that women don’t get to win in the end? (They don’t get the boy of their dreams and they don’t get to be the title of the book, either!)

ANN: That’s a very good point, and I think there’s a contrast with her previous novel, which was published the same year. (I mean, she was just in a frenzy of creativity.) But what’s unusual about Romance of a Shop is that the sisters all run this photographic studio themselves. They’re independent and they don’t need to attract a man. They’re getting on with their lives. But Reuben Sachs takes a more oblique view of the marriage market. It’s a more cynical view and I think it emphasizes the fact that, more realistically for women, particularly Jewish women, was that to have any sense of identity they would have to get married and have children. And they’d have to marry well. Reuben Sachs would be an advantageous marriage for Judith Quixano, because she has no money and she needs the support. She is generously supported by the Leuniger family. Bear in mind that even though Amy Levy is very savagely ironic in this book, she makes it clear that the families are very kind. They have looked after Judith. They have treated her as one of their own. They don’t see her as a threat, even though she might possibly marry the golden son whom they want to do well and climb the social ladder. They don’t dislike her for that or shun her or treat her as a poor relative. They actually treat her very well. And so part of the novel is about the closeness of families. But within families, there is a bit of jockeying for power, for what way of life they aspire to. Reuben has to be the successful son. We have the contrast with Leo, who plays the violin beautifully, but he’s never going to do anything important. He’s never going to make a lot of money, whereas Reuben is their chance. So I think their relationship with Judith, he’s not toying with her. We’d probably see it today as that he’s being very selfish, but in a way, that represents a part of him that’s probably his truer part, but he knows he has this responsibility to the family to climb the ladder to do well. And so the novel is a critique, that it’s as hard on him as it is for Judith. But Judith, as you say, is the heroine. We understand what she’s thinking; we see things very much from her point of view and how she accepts that the love she has for Reuben isn’t going to be possible in the community that they live in.

KIM: That’s actually a perfect segue into getting Judith’s perspective. So in counterpoint to what Amy read with Reuben’s feelings for Judith, I’m going to read a little more about Judith’s feelings for Reuben (and it’s also from the beginning of the novel):

Meanwhile Judith, acquiescent, receptive, appreciative, took the good things this friendship offered her, and shut her eyes to the future. Not, as she believed, that she ever for a moment deceived herself. That would scarcely have been possible in the atmosphere in which she breathed. She had known from the beginning, how could she fail to know? that Reuben must do great things for himself in every relation of life; must ultimately climb to inaccessible heights where she could not hope to follow.  Her pride and her humility went hand in hand, and she prided herself on her own good sense which made any mistake in the matter impossible. And that he was so sensible, was what she particularly admired in Reuben.

Judith sees herself the way society does: that he’s “inaccessible” to her. And, to underline our point regarding Levy’s focus on Judith and women in general, Julia Neuberger writes in the preface of the Persephone edition, “This is a novel about women, and Jewish women, about families, and Jewish families, about snobbishness, and Jewish snobbishness.” 

AMY: Levy is very critical of the day-to-day life of women in the book. It’s very different from Levy’s own life among these intellectual women writers that she was palling around with. The women in this novel are basically kind of shallow — they’re gossiping, playing cards, and shopping. I’d say that Levy’s tone is mocking and cynical, at times. 

KIM: It’s not exactly flattering, but she also shows how the women are fairly trapped in that lifestyle. It’s what’s expected of them. She’s writing about Jewish high society, and as a Jewish author, you would think that Levy might have been lauded for what she saw as a more realistic portrayal of Jewish characters in this milieu, but it actually resulted in a lot of controversy at the time the book was published — people were shocked. And it’s also potentially problematic for modern readers as well. Ann, can you help us by delving into Levy’s portrayal of contemporary Jews in the novel and maybe what she was trying to do with that?

ANN: I think at the time she was criticized, very much, when the book came out, and I think it probably took her by surprise because probably the milieu that she was in at a daily level were intelligent women, writers, people who could understand approaching things in a slightly different way. I think that Levy didn’t see it as an attack on the Jewish community. You have to remember that she herself (as far as we know) she seemed to be attracted to other women, and she wanted to have a relationship with another woman. I think she craved acceptance in a community and to find an attachment to another woman and live that life. But she knew, particularly with Jewish women, that wouldn’t be possible because as far as they were concerned, they had to get married; they had to have children. They couldn’t have a romantic female friendship. And probably Gentile women, Amy felt she wasn’t very attractive to them. She felt, as a Jewish woman, they would look down on her and they would not see her as the same social level that they were. So she felt a bit trapped and she was satirizing the society that made her feel so ostracized. But she didn’t dislike her community. She was very close to her family, to her cousins, to her friends. So the fact that people read the book in a very literal sense to say that she was criticizing the community, I think they just didn’t get it. She was criticizing and satirizing the sort of English society as a whole that commodified women. That made getting money the only important thing. That made climbing the ladder of success the only important thing and sacrificed women in the pursuit of money and power. I think she felt she was making a funny riposte to novels like, as we’ve said, Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, which has been called a philo-Semitic novel — she’s trying to create very positive Jewish characters. But Amy Levy thought, “No, that’s just creating another set of cliches. This is what I want to show it’s like, and I’m making a sort of funny, almost documentary-like study of a community and this is how it works, from the very garish furniture to the not-very-well-designed clothes that the women wear, and so on.” I think it’s actually meant to be affectionate, in a funny way, and I think it hurt her when people turned against her for that.

AMY: Yeah, it seems like as a member of the community you do have a little more license to be satirical about your own people, right?

ANN: Yeah. It’s like Woody Allen or Philip Roth or somebody like that. It’s an “in joke” for the community. That’s how I see it.

AMY: You can definitely see that as you’re reading the novel, but at the same time, as a modern reader, you do feel a little uneasy. Like, “Am I supposed to be laughing? I know she meant that to be funny, but I don’t necessarily feel like I should laugh.” And then there are also… the fact that she kind of paints all the different members of the family differently with regard to how they practice their faith. So you have the devout patriarchs of the family. Then you have one cousin who’s basically a nonbeliever; she doesn’t even bother going to synagogue at all. The cousin, Leo, that you mentioned, he’s an artist who’s grappling with what he doesn’t like about the Jewish culture, whereas Reuben eloquently defends the faith at every opportunity. So it feels a lot like she was making the family be a microcosm for the whole Jewish community and how they interact with one another and how they treat one another. They will have their little spats within the community. I think I’d even read that at the time there was a large influx of Eastern European Jews immigrating to England at this time and you could almost sense that there’s a kind of hierarchy. Who’s the “correct Jew?” Who’s the “right Jew?”

ANN: Yeah. Her own family, they did assimilate a lot in English society and they were English people, but they were Anglo-Jews. It was almost like the deal was that you could fit into English society if you didn’t appear too Jewish. You could be Jewish, but you weren’t really allowed to mention your religion or expect to have it respected. They were in an uneasy sort of relationship with the other middle class people that they knew, and as you say, this influx of immigrants caused (as it has done in modern times) a sort of increased racism in general in English society). So the people who were Jewish almost had to play it down in wider society, whereas in the privacy of their own homes and the connections to their own families, they could be themselves. They were on a tightrope, really, between the two different lifestyles that they had and what they aspired to, which often involved them denying their important Jewish rituals and family values. 

KIM: I think that’s really great context to help us understand sort of what Levy’s trying to do here and what her community would have been like, and maybe also, why she was surprised that they were shocked. And I think we’ve probably intrigued our listeners enough that it might be a great time to share another passage from the book so they can get a feel of the beauty of the writing in the book that we describe. Ann, would you like to read a passage?

ANN: Sure. So this passage is from near the start of the book after Rueuben has returned from his travels and is being welcomed with a small family reception, and his cousin, Leo is there. Leo is a talented violin player. It’s funny, because he’s studying classics at Cambridge, but none of the family think that’s very important. But when he starts to play his violin, then the mood changes a little:

Then, all at once, the music broke forth. The great, vulgar, over-decorated room with its garish lights, its stifling fumes of gas, was filled with the sound of dreams; and over the keen faces stole, like a softening mist, a far-away air of dreamy sensuousness. The long, delicate hands of the violinist, the dusky, sensitive face, as he bent lovingly over the instrument, seemed to vibrate with the strings over which he had such mastery.

The voice of a troubled soul cried out to-night in Leo's music, whose accents even the hard brilliance of his accompanist failed to drown. As the bow was drawn across the strings for the last time, Ernest’s solitaire board fell to the ground with a crash, the little balls of Venetian glass rolling audibly in every direction.

The spell was broken; every one rose, and the card-players, who by this time were hungry, came strolling in from the other room.

AMY: It’s almost foreshadowing the fact that Judith’s spell is going to be broken, too, you know, the spell that Reuben has cast over her, the beauty of their relationship... it’s all about to come crashing down, sadly, for her. 

ANN: Yes, because the music is very much tied in with Reuben’s feelings about Judith; that if they could just escape from all the stuff that surrounds them, from the life, from the expectations, that they could soar to a higher level of love and communication. And it’s that feeling of bitterness, in a bittersweet way, that they have such love for each other (it’s very clear) but somehow the spell has to be broken. The solitaire game breaks it up and the card players come in and the family chat commences. It’s a lovely moment, I think, because it shows you the promise that true love could find, and I think it shows something of Amy’s own yearning for a moment like that and how the spell keeps getting broken; the sadness comes back into the happy unity they found.

AMY: Judith had very limited options for her future, and maybe Amy felt that way, as somebody that was attracted to women. She felt like, “Okay, there’s not a route for me,” you know, so in the same way that Judith just has to accept what she’s been dealt, Amy just has to realize that maybe she’s not going to get to have a relationship like that. 

ANN: Yeah. That poignancy of soul mates, that you can feel very close to somebody, and they can be a soul mate, and yet, something intervenes. Society intervenes. You can’t build your life around that person because there are too many expectations of you to do something otherwise, I think. Yes.

AMY: She wrote that Judith would have had to just “open her mouth and shut her eyes and swallow what the fates had sent her.” So basically, this idea that life is a bitter pill for women and their only option is to accept it.

ANN: Yes, and I think it’s also important to say there is a great sadness in the book, but there is also a hopefulness, and I think, without any plot spoilers, the book ends on a hopeful note. Despite everything that’s happened there is promise for the future, and I think part of that promise is that women will be more fulfilled in the future. That they will be truer to themselves. There’s a certain hope that that will take place. That things won’t always be like this.

AMY: Which is true. It did change for us.

ANN: Indeed. Yes. 

KIM: I think we can say it’s not an entirely happy ending, but maybe there is a little hope. 

ANN: Definitely. 

AMY: Of course, Levy’s own ending is not happy, either. It’s quite sad. As we said, she took her life just a few days before her 28th birthday and she left instructions to be cremated, which was very unusual for a Jewish person. 

KIM: Yeah, I think I read she was the first Jewish woman in London to ever request to be cremated, in fact. Ann, do we know much about the final months or weeks of her life and do we know what prompted her to take her own life? I know there are a couple of different theories. What are your thoughts? 

ANN: Well, I think, as you said, she suffered lifelong bouts of clinical depression, and depression was not well understood at that time. I mean, it’s still not well understood, in a way, but people thought, “Oh, she’s a poet; she’s melancholy; that all fits with her.” Nobody, perhaps, took it very seriously, how debilitating it was for her. Her brother had died (had probably taken his life) the year before, it’s thought because he suffered from syphilis. So that’s bound to have affected her. And even though she seemed not to be affected by the criticisms of Reuben Sachs, she put it to one side, she carried on writing and socializing, there was obviously a sadness underneath it all. During this period, the book had come out, she was doing well — it was selling well — and she met the poet W.B. Yeats. He said later about her she was a very striking-looking woman but you could tell the sadness beneath it all. So that’s very telling. He wasn’t the only person who commented that she had a slightly, perhaps manic, side to her. She was working incredibly hard, but there was a sadness underneath it, that perhaps she was holding it at bay. And then the month of August, she’d heard The Jewish Chronicle made a negative comment about Reuben Sachs, and perhaps that just sent her into a spiral of despair. She’d had spirals before and come out of them, but this one, she didn’t get better, and she took her life in September, 1889, so it’s desperately sad, and it’s such a shame because she was actually making a name for herself. At this time, she was going out, she was socializing; she was making plans and arrangements and writing essays and planning to be published. She knew her career was taking off at this point, but she just fell into despair and she didn’t come out of it. So it’s very sad.

KIM: I’m wondering if the issues with the satirical portrayal of Jews is maybe one of the reasons this book isn’t as well-known as maybe it should be? What are your thoughts on sort of why it’s maybe not as well-known?

ANN: Yes, I think it is partly to do with that. It was felt people read it very literally; that Amy Levy would still, some people would describe her as a self-hating Jew. But I think that’s very unfair and I think it oversimplifies what she was trying to do. I think she was trying to show something of the life of her Jewish community. The good things, the bad things. But do it in a witty, literary way, and she was very much placing herself along with Trollope, along with George Eliot and Dickens and people like that, to show people that she could use a literary novel to subvert some of the expectations of Jewish life at the time. She told herself she wanted to be like Zola or Alfonse Daudet, French naturalists. She wanted to do something similar for her own community. So I think if she’d been male, people would have seen the book, perhaps, on a different level, but almost like some women writers, we’ll say today, “Well, women publish more memoirs; women write about their experiences.” But it’s almost like, well, that’s what they’re expected to do and that’s what they’re allowed to do, rather than say, she’s being very clever; she’s subverting expectations of what a woman writer can write about. And she’s been forgotten about and neglected because of that. 

KIM: I agree with you completely, and I think it is a real shame. I hope that at least a few of our listeners will read this book, because honestly, it is so worth your time. It’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve read in the last few years, and as you can imagine, I’ve read a lot of books in the last few years. So yeah, please, please read this book. 

ANN: It’s also worth mentioning Oscar Wilde’s obituary for her. As you said, he saw her work as having “a touch of genius,” and she wrote several things for his magazine. He said, even if you just read her poetry (because you can read her poetry; it’s online, it’s available) he said, “that would be enough to mark the writer as a poet of no mean excellence.” and that “no intelligent critic could fail to see the promise of greater things in her poetry.” And I think the same thing would go, even more so, for her fiction, because she would have developed into much deeper novels. I think she was very much at a beginning period. But the fact that she could write with such extraordinary sophistication and beauty at such a young age shows the promise of greater things that were sadly not to be. She was a Jewish writer who wasn’t afraid to take on some of the precious beliefs of what a woman should be, and that marriage and children were the highest object of a woman’s life. I think that she was prepared to challenge that in her own life, the way she lived her life and how she earned her living and how she had ambitions as a writer and wanted to take on the established writers of the time. And I think that’s very moving when you think how early on that was — 1889 — it was just the beginning of women finding their voice, finding their unique individualism in society and being able to be themselves. The fact that she didn’t fit in so much but that she dared to write what she believed and what made sense to her and what was beautiful to her is very moving, and I think it’s very valuable for that reason. As long as you don’t take it too seriously and feel that she was being entirely serious. She’s being very ironic. She’s being satirical. And it’s just taking it with a pinch of salt. It’s very moving that her family, even long after she died, her sisters were approaching publishers and saying “Won’t you reissue this book? It’s really good.” Nobody who was close to her… didn’t feel she was somehow criticizing them; they felt this was just her and that’s how she wrote and that she should be better known.

KIM: Mm-hmm. There’s always the people that take things too literally, unfortunately.

ANN: Yes.

AMY: Do you have any other favorite lost ladies of literature that you would recommend taking a look at, especially any other Cambridge ladies?

ANN: Yes, well one of the nonfiction things I would suggest is called A Suppressed Cry by Victoria Glendinning, and it’s a biography of a woman at Newnham at the same time (or just after) Amy Levy. It’s a very short little biography, but it brings to life what it was like to be a student at that time. She actually enjoyed her studies there, but she couldn’t make it work. She didn’t stay very long at Newnham, and it’s good to read the story to find out why that was. As far as fiction is concerned, there’s a novelist called F.M. Mayor. She wrote The Third Miss Symons in 1913. Flora Mayor had been a student at Newnham in the 1890s. She then became an actress, but wasn’t very successful. Ended up going back home and living with her parents in the vicarage and becoming a writer. And actually, she was quite happy with her single life as a writer, but she writes about the third Miss Symons as a very lonely woman who never married, who was a bit like Amy Levy — always wanting to find love — and she never found it. So the book is very poignant about what it was to be a single woman, a rather superfluous woman, at the time. And the other one that she wrote is The Rector’s Daughter. It’s almost looking at it from the other point of view, about a woman called Mary whose father is a rector. She’s quite happy living at home looking after her father, and then she falls in love. It’s just how that disrupts her peace and quiet. It’s just an absolutely lovely book, and it very much sums up that era in a really nice way, I think.

AMY: Newnham College is all new to me. I was unaware of it, really, as being a part of Cambridge until we started working on this episode, and now I’m really kind of fascinated by this women’s college and what it would have been like… (what it’s like still) but also what it would have been like in the early days.

ANN: It’s a good year to notice Newnham because it’s exactly 150 years that Newnham was first established, so there’s going to be a lot of celebrations this year. But I should also mention Girton College, because that was the other women’s college. It was outside of Cambridge and it took a different approach to Newnham, but they both sort of grew up together and eventually became incorporated into the university. Newnham is the last all-women college of Oxford and Cambridge, and it’s very much stayed only women. 

AMY: This discussion has been fascinating. It was so fun getting to dive into this author and this book a little bit more with you! Thank you so much for lending your expertise to us!

KIM: Thanks again, we really appreciate you.

ANN: Well thanks so much for inviting me. It’s been lovely.

KIM: Until next week, don’t forget to sign up for our Lost Ladies of Lit newsletter to keep up to date on all our future authors. And if you have a moment, if you could give us a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast, it would be really helpful. 

AMY: Thanks for joining us everybody! Bye!

KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our website was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes