Women Poets (Guide to the Year's Work) (Critical Essay‪)‬

2010 has been notable for the attention given to Amy Levy, the bold, technically accomplished and politically radical late-nineteenth-century poet, essayist, short-story writer, and novelist. Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman's edited collection Amy Levy: Critical Essays, is an excellent contribution to the resurgence of interest in Levy (see, for example, Linda Hunt Beckman's Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters [Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2000], and Susan David Bernstein's 2006 Broadview editions of Levy's novels Reuben Sachs and The Romance of a Shop). The essays as a whole challenge and complicate Levy's relationship to Judaism and the tendency to read her work and life through her tragic suicide. Contributors circle around several important topics: Levy as an Anglo-Jewish novelist; Levy as a New Woman poet; Levy as an urban writer; and Levy's social, cultural, and professional networks. The collection aims to recover the literary contexts to her writing and addresses all the genres in which she wrote (including novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and correspondence). Many chapters draw on the rich and fascinating material in the privately owned Beth-Zion Abrahams collection of Amy Levy material. Of particular concern for contributors to the collection are her relation to feminist politics and scientific discourse, and the critical reconfiguration of Levy's complex sense of her own identity. Overall, the collection raises the profile of Levy's writing as a major force in the intellectual milieu of late-century Britain. The editors provide a compelling introduction, arguing for a multifaceted approach to Amy Levy that embraces her complex and sometimes contradictory intellectual, political, and literary influences. In addition, the selected bibliography gives a useful list of works by Levy, including a selection of those published in periodicals, and a selection of important reception material. Three essays in particular will interest Victorian Poetry readers. Firstly, T. D. Olverson's "'Such Are Not Woman's Thoughts': Amy Levy's 'Xantippe' and 'Medea'" (pp. 110-131), which focuses on two of her most discussed poems as key points in the development of Levy's thought. Olverson argues that the dramatic monologue "Xantippe" and the closet drama "Medea" engage with Hellenism for political effect. Levy's Hellenism is presented in terms of recent critical debate that positions late-Victorian women as moving into the classics (rather than being excluded by it) as a way to challenge their contemporary culture. The essay presents the importance of Plato's Symposium to "Xantippe" as well as to Victorian debates about the Woman Question: "Levy's poem challenges not only the masculine values of antiquity but also the contemporary male writers and philosophers who threatened to reinstate and thereby culturally legitimize the same elitist and prejudicial attitudes in Victorian England" (p. 118). Olverson sees in Xantippe a provocative challenge to Plato's and Socrates' view of women and the intellectual sphere, even as it underlines Levy's own exclusion from male discourse, a discourse which women must learn in order to change. Xantippe, a "figure of angry protest"--leads to Levy's next development in her Hellenism, the closet drama "Medea." This classical figure, "disavowed and disenfranchised," allows Levy "to articulate her anxieties concerning her Anglo-Jewish identity and her feminist beliefs" (p. 122). While the broad strokes of this reading are in harmony with other critiques of Levy, Olverson is significant for the specific contexts of the Victorian interest in Medea (pp. 124-125) and especially the relation between Medea and Jewish immigration into England. The essay, in addition, demonstrates how Levy appropriates the racial terminology of the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer to engage in debate about Jewishness and national identity: "Medea's social isolation and eventual exile suggest the difficulty of maintaining a dia