Oscar Wilde’s queer and Jewish female friend - The Jewish Chronicle

The private work of Amy Levy, the little-known Jewish novelist, poet and essayist hailed as a genius by her contemporary Oscar Wilde, is finally accessible to the public after spending more than a century in a sealed archive, opening a door into a fascinating world.

Cambridge University Library recently acquired the trove of letters, draft manuscripts, photographs and sketches by the 19th-century writer, whose trailblazing work explored feminism, sexuality and Jewishness in the Victorian era. The archive offers the first glimpse into Levy’s world since her premature death aged 27 in 1889.

“It’s strange to have a writer who lived long ago and yet feels more academically alive because there’s not all that much research out there about certain parts of this collection,” says PhD student Aviv Reich, whose research explores the prose fiction of late 19th-century Anglo-Jewish writers. “With the archive being opened up, we almost have that exciting sense of being at the beginning of something again.”

Born in 1861 into a middle-class Jewish family in London, Levy wrote three poetry collections, three novels and a series of articles for the Jewish Chronicle before she took her own life. Her 1888 novel Reuben Sachs, about a lawyer in an affluent Anglo-Jewish community who spurns his love interest in pursuit of a more politically and socially advantageous marriage, was controversial for perceived antisemitic stereotypes; a review in the Jewish World opined that Levy “apparently delights in the task of persuading the general public that her own kith and kin are the most hideous types of vulgarity”, while the JC refused to review the novel altogether.

But Levy’s early essays for the JC and her later work demonstrated a fond – albeit boundary-pushing – outlook on her Jewish identity. Wilde, who wrote an obituary for Levy, commended the “sincerity, directness, and melancholy” of her writing, and dubbed Reuben Sachs “a classic”. Thanks to the new availability of her personal archive, previously owned by a private corporation, a more complete picture of Levy’s world – including the impact negative reviews had on her mental health, as well as insight into her prestigious social circles and her relationships with women – is emerging.

“Her papers let us see the life she was living, and we’re shown a fascinating person,” says writer and University of Oxford history postgraduate Charlie McEvoy, one of the first Levy scholars to visit the archive at its new Cambridge home. “She’s recording visits to artists’ studios, going to Le Chat Noir burlesque club in Paris, meeting other writers such as WB Yeats. In 1889, she writes about going to the ‘Lady’s Literary Dinner’ with Mona Caird, one of the most radical literary voices of the early women’s movement. Newspaper accounts of the dinner describe Levy as vivacious and animated, keeping ‘those around her in a constant ripple of laughter’. It’s a scene totally at odds with the melancholy picture so often painted of her.”

Levy, who became only the second Jewish woman to attend Cambridge University as one of its first generation of female students, exhibited a talent for writing in her early teens, which was encouraged by her parents. In 1886 her father, a stockbroker, arranged for her to write a series of articles for the JC, including “The Ghetto in Florence”, “Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day” and “Jewish Humour”, which reflected her progressive, non-religious views of Jewish culture. Despite battling episodes of clinical depression throughout her twenties, Levy published poems, essays and stories in magazines, much of which was met with praise. So too was her first novel, The Romance of a Shop, about the challenges met by 19th-century women pursuing independent lives.

“To write thus at six-and-twenty is given to very few,” Wilde said of Levy’s work, lamenting after her death: “The world must forgo the full fruition of her power.” But her writing was largely abandoned from the 1890s. With the advent of the Cambridge archive, which includes diary entries from her final months, Levy’s literary contributions and personal insights may find new life among modern audiences.

“There’s something especially appropriate about Amy Levy’s archive finding a home in the library, given her status as one of the first generation of women to attend the university,” says the university’s senior archivist John Wells.

“It’s rare nowadays for a coherent corpus of a 19th-century author’s papers to come to light, and we were determined to take the opportunity to make her archive available in the place where she studied and where she visited even in the last months of her life,” Wells adds.

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Literature