Reuben Sachs.
A Satirical Response To
Daniel Deronda
[Judaica]. Levy, Amy. Reuben Sachs/A Sketch. London: Macmillan and Co., 1888.
8vo.; bookplate of previous owner (“Lieutenant Commander Edward Scott Williams, Royal Navy”) on front pastedown; hinges tender; spine slightly cocked; blue cloth, stamped in gilt; front cover and spine lightly, almost imperceptibly, watermarked.
First edition of this satiric novel by the English poet and fiction writer Amy Levy. Many scholars believe that Reuben Sachs, a tale whose themes are the conservatism, materialism, and repression of women in the Anglo-Jewish community, was prompted by and written in response to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, constituting a sort of feminist dialogue on issues of religion, race, class, and economic empowerment of women.
Amy Levy (1861-1889) was born at Clapham, England and educated in Brighton, where her parents moved in 1876. The precocious author published her first poem at age 13, in The Pelican, a feminist journal. Levy went on to study at Newnham as the first Jewish student, and published another poem in The Pelican and a story in Temple Bar during her first term. At 18 she published a letter in the Jewish Chronicle on “Jewish Women and Women’s Rights.” She contributed to Oscar Wilde’s Women’s World and published Xantiippe, a defense of Socrates’ maligned wife, in 1881.
During her adult life Levy took on various sorts of work (she supposedly worked in a factory, lived in a garret, and taught in London) but during all this time she was still composing creative and challenging fictional and poetic pieces which questioned the status quo of mainstream society. She also traveled throughout Europe by herself and gained the friendship of such notable figures as Olive Schreiner during her travels. Her mature publications include A Minor Poet and Other Verse (1884); The Romance of a Shop (1888, about four sisters who set up a photography studio); Reuben Sachs (published that same year, 1888); and Miss Meredith (1889, about an independent woman who works as a governess in Italy). Levy committed suicide at her parents’ house in 1889; one week prior she had been in the process of correcting proofs for her final book of poems, A London Tree, which was published posthumously in 1889.
A nice copy of a scarce novel by an intriguing and often overlooked Jewish feminist author.
(#4466)
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