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This chapter focuses on Amy Levy, a gifted and precocious daughter of middle-class Anglo-Jewish parents. Her literary output during her short life was impressive and included three novels, three volumes of poetry, and many works of criticism and short stories. However, Levy struggled with melancholy, depression, unrequited loves, and increasing deafness. At the age of twenty-seven, Levy committed suicide. At the end of her life, Levy thought of herself as a child of the city, whose place was among the struggling crowd of dwellers in the city. Although Levy was a supporter and contributor to the Women's Protective and Provident League, which promoted self-help among working women, only a small portion of her work focused on working-class London or poverty. This chapter presents some of the poetry of Levy, which was part of her posthumously published A London Plane-Tree. These poems offer the sounds and sights of London.

This chapter shows that women poets used the Round Reading Room of the British Museum to experience kinds of exteriority that proved crucial to their writing. They met and created networks of friendship, found mentors and publishers, inspired and encouraged one another in their literary careers, and perhaps most surprisingly, did research. A. Mary F. Robinson, Amy Levy and Mathilde Blind used the national library collection not only to gather knowledge of ideas and topics, but also to understand themselves as part of traditions of women's poetic production that extended backwards into the past and forwards, with revolutionary possibility, into the future.

In this essay, Linda K. Hughes casts light on Amy Levy’s (1861–89) dexterous placement of her poetry in carefully selected newspapers throughout the 1880s. Levy is perhaps best known for her novels and three published volumes of poetry, as well as for her associations with various intellectual and political coteries in fin de siècle London; however, she was, in fact, ‘entrepreneurial’ in her dealings with the daily and weekly newspapers she published in throughout the 1880s, often ‘submitting in a verse medium that had already found favor with the editors’ (p. 459). The significance of media publishing contexts for Levy’s career has been underplayed in scholarship of the author, yet, as Hughes cautions, to obscure this dimension of her authorship is ‘to miss a crucial dimension of her work, even to distort her achievement and her engagement with the publishing world’ (p. 456). What emerges from this account is an entirely new perspective on Levy as a savvy and strategic newspaper poet, with a perspicacious understanding of poetry’s relationship with ‘audience, placement, and opportunity in the Victorian press’ (p.457).

This chapter examines historical traces of women writers at the British Museum Reading Room. It shows that Eleanor Marx, Clementina Black, Constance Black Garnett and Amy Levy engaged in translation work, and sometimes this work was facilitated through their contacts or research at the British Museum.

The life and works of Oscar Wilde, the epitome of decadence, were shaped by Jews. This chapter looks not so much at Wilde himself as at the multiple and contradictory affiliations between Wilde and Jews, who included visual artists like William Rothenstein, gay littérateurs like Marc-André Raffalovich and Reggie Turner, and women writers like Ada Leverson, Amy Levy, and Julia Frankau. In their rich and multifarious relationships with Wilde and with his rehabilitated posthumous reputation, Jewish writers, artists, and critics negotiated their relations to the gentile-dominated but increasingly open English public sphere, forming a cultural space for Jews where even after his death, the prophetic Wilde was taken as a social rebel, believer in art-for-art’s sake, and representative of queerness.

Molly Youngkin’s essay investigates the heterosexism of a fin de siècle feminist newspaper, the Women’s Penny Paper (1894–99, later retitled the Women’s Herald and the Woman’s Signal), highlighting its treatment of three controversies: the Oscar Wilde trials, the death of poet Amy Levy, and the emergence of Sappho as a model of lesbian new womanhood. When the paper did address these controversies it ‘reshaped narratives about this [same-sex] desire to fit its own heterosexist agenda,’ responded in a disapproving way, or avoided a discussion of sexuality entirely (p. 543). The overall effect of this editorial bias was to pursue an ‘overarching agenda of advocating for heterosexual women’ and to reinforce social purity debates about ‘the effects of men’s sexual practices on heterosexual women and their families’ (p. 544). These feminist papers thus constructed the ‘other’ in ways that upheld restrictive conventions of race and sexuality while claiming to be vehicles of progressive thought.

Participation in social dancing was an important marker in the Jewish process of embourgeoisement. European Jewish literary texts portray the ballroom as site for testing Jewish admission to elite pastimes and present the ball as a window into Jewish cultural aspirations. The question of whether both Jews and Christians are included in these social spaces is an important issue in many of these texts, revealing the way the dance floor shows gendered pathways to acculturation. Authors frequently underscore this theme by using the dance floor in the service of (unsuccessful) marriage plots. This chapter explores two types of ballroom space: elite non-Jewish balls to which only very select Jews were invited (such as in Karl Emil Franzos’s Judith Trachtenberg, 1891) and Jewish balls that might also include non-Jewish guests (such as in Clementine Krämer’s Der Weg des jungen Hermann Kahn, The Path of Young Hermann Kahn, 1918).