The first Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, published in 1922, contains several poems by the largely forgotten young poet, Amy Levy. The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, published in 1987, produces further - and different - poems by the same Levy, whose reputation, some 60 years on, was even more obscure.
There are several reasons for Levy's descent into obscurity. First, her suicide at the age of 27 meant that she did not leave behind a vast literary output. Second, she was a Jewess, who wrote - at least in one of her novels, Reuben Sachs - about Jewish matters in such a way that much of the Anglo-Jewish establishment found mocking and cruel. Third, she was female, and with the well-known exceptions of the 19th-century greats, like the BrontÔs, and George Eliot, many excellent women writers of the period passed from literary view.
But the publication this month of a new edition of her controversial novel, Reuben Sachs, more than a century after her suicide in 1889, seems set to ensure a revival of her reputation. Well before her time, Levy was questioning ideas of identity, of belonging, the place of immigrants and immigrants' descendants, the insider and the outsider. Though influenced by Eliot, who appeared in Daniel Deronda to be sympathetic towards the British Jewish community, Levy was looking at Jews from the inside and seeing how they struggled for acceptance and yet lived a life apart. She gently mocked Daniel Deronda, suggesting a very different view of identity, belonging, and Britishness.
In Reuben Sachs, a feminist plea and a satire on what Levy saw as the materialism of late Victorian Jews, a Christian convert to Judaism voices disappointment with what Jews as a people offer in middle-class London: " 'Did he expect,' cried Esther, 'to see our boxes in the hall, ready packed and labelled Palestine?'
"'I have always been touched,' said Leo, 'at the immense good faith with which George Eliot carried out that elaborate misconception of hers.'" Born into a comfortable middle-class Jewish family, Levy had a fairly conventional middle-class upbringing though, unusually, she was sent to a school that had serious academic pretensions.
In 1879, she became the first Jewish student at Newnham College, Cambridge but left early. Some have argued that this was prompted by a severe depression that dogged her all her life. She went back to live with her family in Bloomsbury. Olive Schreiner, the South African feminist, met Levy and described her as the most interesting young woman she had met in her time in London.
Levy's first collection of poems, Xantippe, in defence of Socrates' maligned wife, was published when she was 20 and she began a career as a literary essayist and journalist, daring in one essay to criticise the then new literary lion, Henry James, as a tad provincial. Her pieces for the Jewish Chronicle reflect a period of change and self-examination. Many thousands of poor Jews from eastern Europe were pouring into London at the time, fleeing pogroms and enforced military service. Levy and her kind were concerned to keep their rightful - if insecure - place in English society, a position likely to be threatened by the new arrivals.
In a letter to her sister Katie, she seemed to regard anti-semitism as justified when she saw the German Jews of Dresden in a synagogue, which she described as "a beastly place". Today this attitude seems shocking. But the social position of middle-class Jews was fragile in 19th-century London, and that fragility is the key to Reuben Sachs.
Levy mixed with young women who were either socialists or social workers: Clementina Black, Eleanor Marx, Beatrice Webb and others, who were working with the deprived in the east end of London. Levy was forced to face the seriously deprived Yiddish-speaking masses, feeling ambivalent about them, whilst her progressive friends were trying to help.
She was also becoming increasingly involved with other women writers, many of them progressive both politically and personally. Some think that she had lesbian affairs with - or at least homoerotic tendencies towards - other women poets, particularly Vernon Lee. She became part of the Women Writers' Club, whose members became close confidantes and travel companions. Dorothy Bloomfield, Kit Anstruther-Thomson, Mary Robinson and others were part of her circle, and the nature of these relationships may have been romantic or simply the close friendships of intense young women of the period.
In 1888, she wrote and published Reuben Sachs. It was praised by Oscar Wilde but caused a stir in the Jewish community. In it, the paterfamilias, old Solomon, sits with his skullcap on his head, while the younger characters in the novel have left orthodox Jewish practice. Their social lives are largely - but not wholly - among Jews. Meanwhile one family member is fascinated by the landed gentry, and, at Cambridge, spends his time socialising with those who are "out of his class".
The novel's intent is satirical, but there is real affection here. There are undoubtedly mixed images of Jews throughout the novel, and some of the characteristics displayed are less than pleasant. But it throws light on how economic migrants often regard the next wave, and it begs all kinds of questions about material and social values - questions that have only changed slightly in the intervening century. Reuben Sachs is more than just a social curiosity. It succeeds because Levy never wastes a word and, though her material is of her own period, she speaks strongly to us - and with humour.
That humour was short-lived. The year after the publication of Reuben Sachs, she committed suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide gas from the burning of charcoal. Olive Schreiner's letter to Edward Carpenter two days later quotes a note Levy had written her: "She wrote me back a little note. 'Thankyou, it is very beautiful, but philosophy can't help me. I am too much shut in with the personal.'
"Was this depression? Was she hurt and humiliated by her critics, or by her friends? Or did she simply feel that the life she wanted for herself, free of social bonds and bounds, intellectually and emotionally fulfilling, was not going to be possible? It was a tragic early death and a waste of great talent. But, with this new edition of Reuben Sachs, her memory lives on.
• Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy is available from Persephone Books, priced £10, post free. Call 020 7253 5454 or e-mail: sales@persephonebooks.co.uk. Rabbi Julia Neuberger will chair a discussion on the work of Amy Levy at 8.30pm tomorrow at the Royal National Hotel in Bloomsbury, London, as part of Jewish Book Week, which runs until March 11.
