Amy Levy

Born in London to an assimilated middle-class Jewish family, Amy Levy published her first poem at age fourteen and studied at the Brighton School for Girls. In 1879, she was the first Jewish woman to enroll at Cambridge University’s Newnham College, where she encountered antisemitism. Levy returned in 1881 to London, where she associated with circles of social reformers, socialists, and feminists. While visiting Florence in 1886, she fell in love with the writer Violet Paget. Levy’s writing reflects her struggles with the New Woman ideal, which she embraced. Her novel, Reuben Sachs (1889), received criticism for its antisemitic stereotypes. Levy published numerous essays, critiques, short stories, satires of Jewish life, translations of Hebrew and German poetry, and three books each of prose and collected verse. Suffering from clinical depression, Levy committed suicide at the age of twenty-eight.