Amy levy biography

A Biographical Note

Amy Judith Levy, a late Victorian poet and novelist, was born on 10th November 1861 at Clapham, South London, into an upper middle-class Jewish family. Her father was a stockbroker.

At fourteen, Amy was sent to Brighton High School, run by the Girls’ Public Day School Trust, where she soon became spellbound by the young headmistress, Miss Edith Creak, the type of a New Woman freshly graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge, which had already admitted women students.

While in Brighton, Amy made lifelong friends with Clementina Black, the future novelist and publicist, and her sister Constance, the future translator of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Anton Chekhov. After finishing the Brighton High School, Levy was enrolled as the second Jewish woman at Cambridge University and the first at Newnham College, where she studied classical and modern languages and literature between 1879 and 1881.

Amy left Cambridge without completing her degree and decided th