SOURCE: "'Neither Pairs nor Odd': Female Community in Late Nineteenth-Century London," in Signs, Vol. 15, No. 4, Summer, 1990, pp. 733-54.

In the essay below, Nord explores how Levy's poetry and fiction reflect the social realities of London in the 1880s.

[Amy Levy] dealt the most directly with her single state and her urban existence; she was also the most overtly ambivalent about the sexual identification of her public persona. Her Jewishness made her more thoroughly and permanently an outsider in English society than either [Beatrice] Webb or [Margaret] Harkness: theirs was at least in part a willed marginality; Levy's was inherited and indelible. Still, in her poetry she writes of her alien status only obliquely, and in her novel Reuben Sachs she signals a marked ambivalence about her ties to her own people. She was the only member of this group who had been to university—she was educated at...