literary profession and urban public life. In Romance of a Shop, Levy portrays Gertrude the very image of such a self-assertive, independent New Woman writer, who negotiates the city’s gendered and increasingly commodified spaces. In her life and London poetry, Levy represents also the female poet as urban writer-observer, strolling, watching, and eulogizing the city while making her claim to a life of independence that the city brings her to.
An Anglo-Jewish woman of letters, Amy Levy was one of the women who moved easily about London of the 1880s as an urban traveler. Levy was the first Jewish woman to be educated at Newnham. She was friends with contemporary female authors like Oliver Schreiner, Eleanor Marx, and Margaret Harkness, who write widely on feminism and politics.47 She paid regular visits to the theater, art galleries, London’s parks, and the library at the British Museum, the last especially a favorite place to many women readers and writers emerging in the fin de siècle period.48 She also attended private salons and parties and events sponsored by
47 Oliver Schreiner was the author of The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Woman and Labor (1911). Eleanor Marx was a talented linguist as well as an active socialist and labor organizer. And Margaret Harkness was a moderately successful novelist and sometimes associate of leading labor militants in the 1880s. See Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women,
Representation, and the City (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995) 181-206.
48 In her 1889 article “Readers at the British Museum,” published in Atlanta: Every Girl’s Magazine aimed at the middle-class female readership, Levy delineates the development of the Reading Room in terms of those it serves, from the earlier elite readers like Isaac Disraeli, Walter Scott, William Godwin, Charles Lamb to the “all sorts and conditions of men and women,” who might be the reader as long as
London organizations like the Women Writers’ Club and the Society of Authors.49 As Victorian woman poet, Levy, however, has been forgotten for decades since her death by suicide in 1888. Despite having enjoyed brief popularity and received praise from her contemporary writer Oscar Wilde,50 Levy and her poetry sink into oblivion not very long after her demise. Like many female poets of her time, Levy is not even included in most of the anthologies of Victorian literature and poetry. It is not until the 1990s when a group of scholars start to re-evaluate the literary merits of poetry by late-Victorian women that Levy, together with other female bards, is read again.51 Levy’s poetry on urban life as observed and celebrated by a female bard is
they are over the age of twenty-one. The significance lies also in the fact Levy is addressing her female readers who have now the access to a reading facility that might have denied their entrance before. This is how she describes the reading room of British Museum as an emerging egalitarian space: “Rich and poor, old and young, competent and incompetent, the successes and failures of life and literature may be met beneath the dome in undistinguishable fellowship. To each and all, no doubt, the “Room”
presents its attractions, for each and all has its uses. For some it is a workshop, for others a lounge;
there are those who put it to the highest uses, while in many cases it serves as a shelter—a refuge, in more senses than one, for the destitute.” (227)
49 See Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Athens, OH: Ohio State UP, 2000) 116-52.
50 Levy’s short fiction “The Recent Telepathic Occurrence at the British Museum” published by Woman’s World in 1888 was highly regarded by Oscar Wilde, who was the editor of the popular journal aiming at the middle-class female readership. He described her little piece as “a real literary gem . . . sent to me by a girl . . . who has a touch of genius in her work.” In the obituary that Oscar Wilde wrote for Amy Levy in 1890, he gave her writing—both her prose and poetry—high praise. About Reuben Sachs, Levy’s novel about Jewish life, he observed, “To write thus at six-and-twenty is given to very few” and expressed his regret that “the world must forgo the full fruition of her power.” Although Levy had earned such respect in her life time and in the period immediately following it, her works were largely unknown until recently scholars begin to show a surging interest in the poetry written by
Victorian women, the literature produced by England’s Jews, and the experience of fin de siècle women, who, like her, were female pioneers to live in an independent and unconventional manner. See Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Athens, OH: Ohio State UP, 2000) xi, 144-45.
51 Some impressive anthologies in particular—Jennifer Breen’s 1994 edition of Victorian Women Poets 1830–1901, Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds’s 1995 edition of Victorian Women Poets, Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow’s 1996 edition of Nineteenth-Century Women Poets, and the two Longman collections (Victorian Women Poets by Tess Cosslett in 1996; and Victorian Women Poets: A New Annotated Anthology by Virginia Blain in 2000)—deserve special mention because they radically challenged the poetic landscape of the nineteenth century by re-introducing and recuperating the work of nineteenth-century women poets. Critical studies which investigated and reinforced this female lineage include, for example, Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (1992); Linda K. Hughes, ed., Victorian Poetry Special Issue: Women Poets, 1830–1894 (1995);
Angela Leighton, ed., Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader (1996); Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, eds., Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre (1999); Cynthia Scheinberg, Victorian Women Poets and Religion (2002); and Alison Chapman, ed., Victorian Women Poets (2003).
recognized as presenting a self-reflexive image and a female counterpart to the flâneur-poet, whose muse is “an urban Muse, and bound / By some strange law to the paven ground.”52
As well as the delicate, strongly autobiographical, feminine voice resounding throughout Levy’s London poetry, which is also audible in the poetry by many late-Victorian women and would be explored in this section, an illustration drawn for this collection lays bare particularly the female identity of the poetic persona. It is one of the two illustrations included in the published form of Levy’s London poetry, in which a female writer is seen working on her pieces at desk, with her back to a panorama of the city accessible through the little garret’s window.53 This might be a useful reference to Levy’s London poetry as being composed and recited by the female minstrel, whose very image has been rendered picturesquely by the illustration enclosed. As many critics have indicated, the bulk of Levy’s poems in A London
Plane-Tree and Other Verse, a collection published posthumously in 1889, allows
much room for identifying the persona as a female bard inhabiting and observing the fin de siècle city.54 In “A London Plane-Tree” and “The Piano-Organ,” for instance, the female poet-speaker reveals herself unmistakably as woman writer making home
52 See Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Athens, OH: Ohio State UP, 2000);
Linda Hunt Beckman, “Amy Levy: Urban Poetry, Poetic Innovation, and the Fin-de-Siècle Woman Poet,” The Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2005) 207-230.
53 As in Levy’s other works of fiction, translation, and essays, this collection is published in the real name of the author, which is not always the case in the publishing world of late-Victorian England, where many female writers still use masculine pseudonyms to appeal to a wider readership. The employment of the real name by female authors, a practice growing popular in Levy’s time when a lot of women writers began to emerge in the literary market, makes a more ready connection between the female author and the persona than the masking of identity through male, assumed names.
54 See Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2000) 89-98; Ana Parejo Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005) 38-77.
in the city, an urban female figure suggesting fin de siècle women’s intrusion into the male-dominated spaces and becoming increasingly recognizable particularly in late-Victorian poetry by women.55
In “A London Plane-Tree,” after which Levy’s collection of urban poetry is named, the female poet is found contemplating the city pageant from her lodging place, a little garret. While suggesting the economical embarrassment of the occupant, the garret as a space nevertheless takes on significances particularly to women writers of the fin de siècle acting out female independence and transgression of gendered spaces conventionally demarcated.56 Here the garret is the very venue such a self-supporting female writer practices her art and commands a view of her urban ambience. The plane-tree, not uncommon in London streets, is the object of her contemplation. This London plane-tree, which retains its freshness, is perceived by the poet-speaker as native to the city’s soil, while the other trees grow brown and droop and pine for country air:
Green is the plane-tree in the square, The other trees are brown;
They droop and pine for the country air;
The plane-tree loves the town.
Here from my garret-pane, I mark The plane-tree bud and blow,
55 See Ana Parejo Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005).
56 See Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (London: Macmillan, 2000) 178-179.
Shed her recuperative bark, And spread her shade below.
Among her branches, in and out, The city breezes play;
The dun fog wraps her round about;
Above, the smoke curls grey.
Others the country take for choice, And hold the town in scorn;
But she has listened to the voice On city breezes borne. (1-16)
In the first stanza, the uniqueness of the London plane-tree in the square is highlighted.
The poet-speaker then in the second stanza reveals herself as occupying the garret, taking a view of the city via the window pane and finding herself attracted to the plane-tree. The city and the country are represented respectively by the contrasting images of the city-loving plane-tree and the other trees, which take the country for choice and “hold the town in scorn” (14). The speaker ultimately finds comfort in the London plane-tree surviving the hardship of city life, the season, and the
unwholesome ambience, which is nevertheless perceived to “bud and blow / Shed her recuperative bark” and “has listened to the voice / On city breezes borne” (6-8). There is also a marked correspondence between the feminized London plane-tree and the female poet-speaker at the garret, who notices the peculiarity of the London plant, in
that both are content with their lot and delight in their urban existences.
As in “A London Plane-Tree,” the female bard in “The Piano-Organ” inhabits a garret and finds her place to be an integral part of the city. The female bard describes herself as working at desk, where the “student-lamp is lighted” and “the books and papers are spread,” and is distracted only by the music coming up from the street:
I open the garret window, Let the music in and the moon;
See the woman grin for coppers, While the man grinds out the tune.
Grind me a dirge or a requiem, Or a funeral-march sad and slow, But not, O not, that waltz tune I heard so long ago.
I stand upright by the window, The moonlight streams in wan:—
O God ! with its changeless rise and fall The tune twirls on and on. (5-16)
The music does not seem to produce a consoling effect as it is expected. The waltz tune played by the street musician simply reminds the listener how long she has been kept from a socially active life, a sacrifice her commitment to literary production might entail. Together with “A London Plane-Tree,” “The Piano-Organ” presents a
delicate observation and reflection by the female poet upon her urban existence, which evokes also the shared experience of women managing to stand on their own in the fin de siècle city.
While the garret represents a space the female bard needs to assert her
autonomy and independence, the newly enlarged public spaces of the fin de siècle city prove to be the very sites she occupies to exercise her poetic imagination. In “London Poets,” for instance, the poet-speaker, who walks around the city, identifies with her predecessors doing exactly the same thing:
They trod the streets and squares where now I tread, With weary hearts, a little while ago;
When, thin and grey, the melancholy snow Clung to the leafless branches overhead;
Or when the smoke-veiled sky grew stormy-red In autumn; with a re-arisen woe
Wrestled, what time the passionate spring winds blow;
And paced scorched stones in summer:—they are dead.
The sorrow of their souls to them did seem As real as mine to me, as permanent.
To-day, it is the shadow of a dream, The half-forgotten breath of breezes spent.
So shall another soothe his woe supreme—
“No more he comes, who this way came and went.” (1-14)
This poem is intended as a memorial to the London poets who had walked and mused about the city before the bard who now follows suite. The affinities between the present poet-speaker and the dead poets are especially manifested through a
suspension of time and space they share. As well as the previous London poets, the poet-speaker is presented as subject to sorrow and sentiment which the urban environment generates.
While presenting itself as a space evoking personal, sentimental outbursts in poems like “London Poets” and “A March Day in London,” the street might be also a site for topical and topological representations of the fin de siècle city. In “Ballad of a Special Edition,” Levy mocks at sensational journalism prevalent in late-Victorian London, a phenomenon metaphorically represented against the backdrops of the city’s imagined geography and the increasingly sensationalized mass journalism. The speaker is repelled by the approach of the newspaper boy, who is a “bird of ill omen”
in heralding the news of murders, evils, and accidents:
He comes; I hear him up the street—
Bird of ill omen, flapping wide The pinion of a printed sheet, His hoarse note scares the eventide.
Of slaughter, theft, and suicide He is the herald and the friend;
Now he vociferates with pride—
A double murder in Mile End!
A hanging to his soul is sweet;
His gloating fancy’s fain to bide Where human-freighted vessels meet, And misdirected trains collide.
With Shocking Accidents supplied, He tramps the town from end to end.
How often have we heard it cried—
A double murder in Mile End. (1-16)
Here Levy offers an alternative picture of the city life, one placed against the largely pleasant urban landscapes found in most of her London poems. The evils and harsh reality of urban life are presented through the daily paper, an emerging public medium accused of taking advantage of the urban mass reader, who craves for sensational report or anecdotes. Despite their topical and topological significances,57 these murders and accidents the speaker refers to throughout the poem are nevertheless subject to fabrication by the public press. Like its dispatcher, the newspaper is imagined and condemned by the speaker as contributing to “gloating fancy” and
“apocryphal” reports (10, 27). Ultimately the speaker is able to dispel such a “bird of ill omen,” whose sounds simply “offend” her ears (26).
As well as being an urban stroller making home and observation in the street, the female bard presents herself as capable user of mass public transportation.
Celebrating the omnibus as an urban, plebian form of transport, Levy is one of the
57 In this sense, Mild End has typological significances regarding its association with not only the crime sites but also another fact that Levy and her Jewish contemporaries might be well acquainted with—that the East End is where the Jewish immigrants have settled down.
first female poets to write about the pleasure of riding on the modern mass vehicle. In
“Ballad of an Omnibus,” the female bard reveals herself a habitual user of the omnibus, a vehicle growing popular with the proletarian masses in the fin de siècle city:
Some men to carriages aspire;
On some the costly hansoms wait;
Some seek a fly, on job or hire;
Some mount the trotting steed, elate.
I envy not the rich and great,
A wandering minstrel, poor and free, I am contented with my fate—
An omnibus suffices me.
In winter days of rain and mire I find within a corner strait;
The ‘busmen know me and my lyre From Brompton to the Bull-and-Gate.
When summer comes, I mount in state The topmost summit, whence I see Croesus look up, compassionate—
An omnibus suffices me. (1-16)
Based on Levy’s experience of riding the omnibus at a time when women hardly show
themselves on the top of the vehicle,58 this ballad is a recital by “a wandering
minstrel, poor and free,” who delights in her humble way of exploring the city via the help of modern mass transportation. The ballad, a form conventionally used by the ancient, wandering minstrel giving vent to his wonders and woes, is employed by Levy to record the love of the modern city by the female poet-passenger. The minstrel identifies herself as a poet of the city and a constant user of the urban vehicle, for “the
‘busmen know [her] and [her] lyre / From Brompton to the Bull-and-Gate.” While carriages or hansoms might present a more comfortable and bourgeois form of
transport, the urban minstrel is content with her bus ride especially in summer because she is able to command a view from the top of “the human tale of love and hate” and
“the city pageant, early and late,” the scenes whereof she extracts “a pleasure deep and delicate” (19-23). Unlike the speaker in “A London Plane-Tree” or “The
Piano-Organ,” who commends a partial view of the city through the pane of the garret and is herself more or less stationary, the female poet mounting the omnibus enjoys a mobile, panoramic view of the crowd and the streetscapes. Through taking an
omnibus, the poet-speaker also distinguishes herself from the well-to-do employing carriages or hansoms, who “look up, compassionate,” thus identifying herself with the proletarian masses who take great pleasure in the bus ride.
While in “Ballad of an Omnibus” the female poet-passenger presents herself as moving and observing amidst the city’s changing pageant, a viewing position shared
58 In July 1929, the London Observer ran a series of articles celebrating George Schillibeer’s opening of the first omnibus line in London exactly a hundred years earlier. In response to that series, Katie Salomon, Amy Levy’s sister, wrote the following letter to the editor: “Dear Sir, In connection with your
58 In July 1929, the London Observer ran a series of articles celebrating George Schillibeer’s opening of the first omnibus line in London exactly a hundred years earlier. In response to that series, Katie Salomon, Amy Levy’s sister, wrote the following letter to the editor: “Dear Sir, In connection with your