Amy Levy – författare

Amy Levy was a talented Anglo-Jewish writer who committed suicide in 1889 at the age of 28. During her brief career she published essays, short stories, three novels and three collections of poetry, but none of them is in print today. To correct this situation and set the stage for a generous selection of her work, Melvyn New introduces Amy Levy as an unmarried Victorian woman and an urban intellectual, disillusioned by the mores of her culture, yet unable to abandon her identification with the English Jews who embodied so much of what she scorned. He reconstructs her world in 1880s England - a time when the president of the British Medical Association warned his colleagues that educated women would become ""more or less sexless"" - raising questions that lead to the tortured heart and mind of this ""found"" writer. Of the novels, ""Reuben Sachs"", which generated strong negative feelings in London's Jewish community, is considered one of the first realistic examinations of assimilated Jewry in 19th century England. ""The Romance of a Shop"" looks at working women in late Victorian society and offers a glimpse of the bohemian world of artists. The shorter fiction ranges from a story about an Anglo-Jewish Cambridge student (who commits suicide) to the portrait of a women turned bitter and cynical by the courtship rituals of the age. The selection of nearly 50 poems includes a dramatic monologue in which Socrates' ""shrewish"" wife explains the world from her own perspective. The essays include sketches on Jewish life in London and a blistering attack on the pomposities of Henry James and his circle.

The Romance of a Shop (1888) is a novel by Amy Levy. Published the year before her tragic death, The Romance of a Shop is the debut novel of a pioneering writer and feminist whose poetry and prose explores the concept of the New Woman while illuminating the realities of Jewish life in nineteenth century London. “The air of desolation which hung about the house had communicated itself in some vague manner to the garden, where the trees were bright with blossom, or misty with the tender green of the young leaves. Perhaps the effect of sadness was produced, or at least heightened, by the pathetic figure that paced slowly up and down the gravel path immediately before the house; the figure of a young woman, slight, not tall, bare-headed, and clothed in deep mourning.” Following the unexpected death of their father, sisters Fanny, Gertrude, Lucy, and Phyllis are left with little inheritance and even less hope for the future. On the brink of despair, they join together to launch a photography business, each contributing to the best of their abilities in order to survive. As Lucy begins an apprenticeship with a local photographer, her sisters purchase and prepare their own studio for her return. Despite their efforts, they struggle to convince customers that a shop owned by women can demand the same prices as those run by men. Through perseverance and luck, however, the Lorimers find success as funeral photographers and through their connection to a prominent artist. As romance, illness, and war interrupt their plans, the sisters find solace in their mutual resolve to not only survive, but provide and care for one another. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop is a classic work of British literature reimagined for modern readers.

The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive is a meditation on a technology that manifests all the hallmarks of human relating, human needs, and human complexities in its interactions with another subject. Amy Levy’s approach applies the psychoanalytic clinical attitude, with its sensitivity to enactment, into the investigation of AI. She makes use of her encounters with AI via media, research, personal usage, and traces woven into her day-to-day relations with people to apprehend the essence of what humanity is enacting. Levy retains an inquisitive, factual stance while noting her emotional reactions, using such tension to best perceive the Other. The New Other contains compelling accounts of her direct engagements with artificial intelligence and intriguing new ideas, such as the concept of the smartphone as “cult groomer”. Levy uses a Bionian framework to chart AI transformations of human sensory experience. Leaning on Freud’s life and death drives, she discusses how the potential and dangers of AI are inseparable from the potential and dangers of human beings. This intelligent book is our guide to a future of unprecedented psychological complexity.

With this elegant edition, Smith & Taylor Classics celebrates Levy’s sharp and modern tale of ambition, survival, and the female gaze. The Romance of a Shop follows the four Lorimer sisters in the wake of their father’s death. Penniless and reliant on each other, they decide to open a photography studio at 20B Baker Street, offering the citizens of London quality portraits.  It’s the 1880s and photography is not only growing in popularity and accessibility, but those with a critical eye are elevating the medium associated with quick and steady cash into a true art form. With more women entering the workforce out of necessity and rebellion, the Lorimer sisters take advantage of newfound independence as they work to survive poverty, the grind and smoke of London, fraught courtships, and melodramatic twists of fate. A novel of sisterhood, love, the female gaze and postmortem photography Levy deftly balances along the thin lines of romance and realism, art and commerce. Featuring a conversational afterword from writers Ruth Madievsky and Rachel León.