1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Levy, Amy

LEVY, AMY (1861–1889), English poetess and novelist, second daughter of Lewis Levy, was born at Clapham on the 10th of November 1861, and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She showed a precocious aptitude for writing verse of exceptional merit, and in 1884 she published a volume of poems, A Minor Poet and Other Verse, some of the pieces in which had already been printed at Cambridge with the title Xantippe and Other Poems. The high level of this first publication was maintained in A London Plane Tree and Other Poems, a collection of lyrics published in 1889, in which the prevailing pessimism of the writer’s temperament was conspicuous. She had already in 1888 tried her hand at prose fiction in The Romance of a Shop, which was followed by Reuben Sachs, a powerful novel. She committed suicide on the 10th of September 1889.