The Woman Who Dared: A Biography of Amy Levy

The Woman Who Dared: A Biography of Amy Levy by Christine Pullen. Kingston upon Thames: Kingston U. Press, 2010. Pp. 243. 20 [pounds sterling]. In Devotion, the 1946 Hollywood biopic about the Brontes, audiences are treated to the spectacle of Emily and Charlotte vying for the affections of the Rev. Arthur Nicholls, and then to the sight of Emily, the loser in this romantic triangle, willingly giving up on life--quite literally embracing death, which comes to her personified as a Byronic Corsair-figure on horseback. This scenario is, of course, preposterous. Nonetheless, it satisfies some readers' need to believe that when a woman writes fiction, she must not be inventing anything. If, like Emily Bronte, she has depicted passion and disappointment, then she must have had a failed affair--a heterosexual one, at that. And if, moreover, she dies young, then the ultimate cause must be heartbreak. Women are, after all, weak creatures; they are more likely to succumb to disease, whether mental or physical, whenever a man rejects them. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar may have thought that they were laying to rest such canards when, more than thirty years ago, they used The Madwoman in the Attic to recast Victorian women authors as imaginative, wild, powerful, and murderous. But old assumptions, it seems, neither die nor fade away. Thus, Christine Pullen's beautifully written new biography of Amy Levy (1861-89)--the British Jewish novelist, poet, short-story writer, and journalist--is marred throughout by its author's determination to prove that Levy was hopelessly in love with the mathematician and proponent of eugenics, Karl Pearson (1857-1956), and that his engagement to another woman was what drove Levy to suicide at age twenty-seven. Earlier scholars, such as Linda Hunt Beckman, have dealt with Pearson in a single sentence or two, placing him in Levy's "advanced" social circle, but otherwise viewing him as of no importance to her story. Pullen, however, is convinced that he holds the key not only to Levy's final and fatal bout of depression, but to a number of Levy's poems and works of fiction, and she combs through these for portraits of Pearson, while portraying him as an unregenerate cad and Levy as his victim. Was Pearson really the center of Levy's emotional and creative existence? The absence of any corroborative documentation, Pullen asserts, is the result of a campaign by Levy's bourgeois Jewish family, which sought to protect her reputation by destroying all incriminating material following her death. Pullen feels confident, however, in holding up the year 1885 as the "turning point" of Levy's life. This was "the defining moment" when Levy realized that Pearson did not want her, even as a member of his breakaway radical discussion group, "The Men and Women's Club," and that this "cruel betrayal" revealed the "feet of clay" of her "idol" (98). Such a conclusion does not stop Pullen from deciding, nevertheless, that there was also a second turning point. Fully four years later--four years in which Levy had almost no contact with Pearson--Levy allegedly learned that Pearson was planning to marry someone else. According to Pullen, this news about Pearson precipitated Levy's suicide, not the drubbing she had just endured from the Jewish community over her novel about the frustrations of young middle-class English Jewish intellectuals, Reuben Sachs: A Sketch (1888), or her own frustrations as a Cambridge University-educated woman whose family prevented her from working as a teacher, required her to live at home indefinitely under parental supervision, and packed her off to the country for rest cures, when she displayed symptoms of mental distress. …