1889 Few literary careers, or literary deaths, are more poignant than Amy Levy’s. She was born at Clapham in 1861, into a cultured and orthodox Jewish family, generally relaxed on matters of religion, who actively encouraged her literary talents. Her father was a stockbroker. She was educated at Brighton and at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she was the first Jewish woman to matriculate. At university her first volume of poems, Xantippe (1881), was named after Socrates’ fabled shrew of a wife – famously supposed to have been in the habit of emptying chamber pots over her luckless husband’s head.
The details of Levy’s subsequent life are tantalisingly mysterious. She may have taught, or worked (out of motives of socialist solidarity) in a factory. She published poetry and fiction including one novel, Reuben Sachs (1888), which caused a furore among Britain’s Jews for its satire on their community’s materialism. Levy was not devout and her poetry suggests she may have been lesbian.
A prey to melancholy, Levy committed suicide in her parents’ London home after correcting the proofs of her fifth volume of verse. She had foreseen this end for herself in a verse monologue, ‘A Minor Poet’, published a few years earlier. It opens with the speaker making preparations to end it all:
What should such fellows as I do,
Crawling between earth and heaven?
Here is the phial; here I turn the key
Sharp in the lock. Click! – there’s no doubt it turned.
This is the third time; there is luck in threes—
Queen Luck, that rules the world, befriend me now
And freely I’ll forgive you many wrongs!
Just as the draught began to work, first time,
Tom Leigh, my friend (as friends go in the world),
Burst in, and drew the phial from my hand,
(Ah, Tom! ah, Tom! that was a sorry turn!)
There was no Tom for Miss Levy. She was 28 years old when she died. She is recorded as the first Jewish woman to be legally cremated in England.