AMY

LEVY (1861–1889)  , English poetess and novelist, second daughter of Lewis Levy, was born at Clapham on the loth 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 188$ 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 loth of September 1889 .