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Amy Levy (1861-1889)
Levy, also a novelist, published three volumes of poetry before she committed suicide. The first Jewish woman to matriculate at a British university (Cambridge), deeply but cunningly indebted to Robert Browning, she writes feminist poems that assault the Christian and Hellenic foundations of modern culture. Simultaneously she writes poems--plaintive, furtive, brash, stunning--about her exclusion from British Christian society. Her work gives a frank and sometimes anguished vision of the problems of living as a supposedly assimilatd Jew in a supposedly "tolerant" nation.
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