Reframing Amy Levy: Photography, Celebrity, and Posthumous Representation

Abstract

This article examines the representation of the poet and novelist Amy Levy (1861–89) after her death, focusing on how her photographic portrait becomes the foundation for her posthumous celebrity. Following her suicide at the age of twenty-seven, Levy's life became surrounded by rumour, as commentators sought to explain why a talented young writer would take her life. While reviewers and memoirists interpret her poetry autobiographically, they also turn to her face as key to her character, following theories of physiognomy. In the process, Levy's image, enshrined in a frontispiece photograph by Montabone, becomes a battleground for various ideological interpretations, as writers including Harry Quilter, Katharine Tynan, and Grant Allen set to work reanimating Levy in order to support their own ideas about female education, genius and ‘madness’, degeneration, and Jewish identity. Allen in particular draws on eugenic theories to transform Levy into a damaging fictional portrait in Under Sealed Orders (1894). This novel, combined with various poetic elegies, co-opts Levy's image in ways that resonate with long-standing notions of doomed Romantic genius and the tragic ‘poetess’, a legacy that has implications not only for Levy's enduring reputation, but also for other late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century women poets that followed in her wake.