October 12, 2006 Issue                                       

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©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

‘Anti-Semitism’ controversy unearthed by Mt. Airyite
by KRISTIN PAZULSKI

Linda Hunt Beckman, whose book tells the story of a brilliant but misunderstood author who took her own life at the age of 27.

Linda Hunt Beckman sat at a long community table in the café/restaurant of The Penn Club Hotel in London. Each morning for seven weeks, she breakfasted in the restaurant before heading to the British Library in Britain’s national museum, where she would spend hours researching the little-known 19th century poet and author, Amy Levy.

Beckman, a Mt. Airy resident, taught English and American literature, composition and women studies at Ohio University from 1983 to 2001. (She is now an adjunct professor at Arcadia University.) As part of becoming a full professor, she had to publish a book on a Victorian writer.

“I wanted to write about a woman who was not well known,” Beckman said, beginning her research with numerous Victorian writers. She came across an essay on Levy in 1991 and was intrigued.

Levy, Beckman described, was a “new woman” in the Victorian era. Skirting the normal domestic life of a woman, Levy attended college, wrote and was achievement-oriented and independent. These aspects of Levy’s personality attracted Beckman to her, and once she read her works, the Mt. Airyite was hooked.

But the most compelling aspects of Beckman’s book Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters, along with its insight into a lesser-known literary figure, were the coincidences and life-long relationships Beckman experienced while researching Levy.

Amy Levy, the little-known Victorian author (seen here as a child), was the subject of a book written by Mt. Airy professor Linda Hunt Beckman. A novel by Levy was attacked in her time as anti-Semitic, but Beckman insists the charge was unjustified.

Amy Levy was an Anglo-Jewish woman, born in 1861 to Isabelle and export merchant Lewis Levy. She was the second Jewish woman to have studied at Newnham, University of Cambridge’s women’s college, enrolling in 1879 only eight years after Cambridge opened its doors to female students.

Levy’s life was the struggle of a female writer in the Victorian period, when independent women were emerging but still frowned upon.“She didn’t just follow the crowd,” said Beckman, adding an illustration of Levy’s independence through the way she dressed. In a time when corsets and tight dresses fashioned the female attire, Levy donned a more flowing, artistic dress, sans-corset.

“There’s a letter Levy wrote to her friend, explaining the pain of getting into a bustle,” Beckman said, explaining that a bustle was the bump worn under dresses that women in that time wore to extend their rear end.

Once Beckman decided to study Levy for her book, she contacted the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts in England to see if they had original papers on Levy. Although Levy was not widely known beyond intensely Victorian literary circles in the 1990s, in her own time she was popular.

Beckman’s timing was perfect. Levy’s papers, previously unavailable to the public while in the hands of author Beth Abraham, had just been sold by Southerby’s, an auction house in London. Abraham had been planning to write a biography on Levy but never completed it, and her heirs provided Sotherby’s with Levy’s papers when Abraham died.

The investment firm which purchased Levy’s papers gave Beckman permission to sort through and research them in London. Beckman received a grant from Ohio University for her seven weeks of research in London.

“It was tremendously thrilling,” Beckman said. “They just gave me these boxes with all the personal things that you could dream of receiving.”

In that box contained not only drafts of Levy’s works, but the writer’s letters, diaries and essays. Through the letters especially, some of which were retyped by Beckman and fill about half of the book, she discovered details of Levy’s life little known even to the community of scholars who know her work.

Despite Levy’s assumed confidence as an independent woman, Beckman said her letters confirmed an underlying depression that she battled throughout much of her short life, which ended in suicide at the age of 27. The letters and some poems, both published and unpublished, also suggest Levy was a lesbian, though Beckman said it seems she never acted on her emotions.

“Through the letters, I speculate that she had disappointments in love,” said Beckman, whose favorite finding was copies of a question-and-answer parlor game, where relatives would answer questions based on Levy’s personality, and she’d answer the questions for herself, which they would seemingly compare. Beckman said it revealed Levy and her family’s humorous, fun side.

Coincidently, while learning about Levy’s possible love life and her relationships with family and friends, Beckman was establishing her own relationship each morning at the breakfast table.

Dick Beckman, an English professor at Temple University, was coordinating the overseas program on London in 1992, when Beckman (then Linda Hunt) was conducting her research. He was staying as a resident in The Penn Club Hotel, and each morning Linda, Dick and a group of people would breakfast at the restaurant’s long tables.

The well-traveled couple could have crossed paths before, having both grown up in New York City (she in the Bronx, he in Brooklyn) and traveled to similar places. During the civil rights movements in 1968, Linda actually spent two months in a cabin without water or power, studying the African American community in Alabama, who were living in extreme poverty.

Linda and Dick spent four years courting each other distantly while she lived in Ohio and he in Philadelphia, and though they married in 1996, the Beckmans didn’t move in together until 2001, when they settled in Mt. Airy.

During her time in London, Beckman researched Levy’s genealogy to see if she had any living relatives. As it turned out, Beckman discovered she herself was a distant cousin to the author, whom she was beginning to feel a strong connection to because of the research and her letters. By studying Levy’s genealogy, Beckman discovered Levy’s great-niece and nephew were alive and living in London. They were the grandchildren of Amy Levy’s sister Katie.

Because of Levy’s letters to her sister Katie, Beckman felt as if she knew the author’s sister. She had seen photos of her, too, and was surprised when she met Katherine, Katie’s granddaughter, in the flesh. “In my imagination, I thought she would look like Katie,” Beckman said. “I knew her because most of Amy’s letters were to her and I saw photos of her.” Beckman and Katherine, who are close in age, are still friends, six years after the book’s publication.

Though Levy wasn’t very religious, she had a strong Jewish cultural foundation, which got her in trouble in 1888. Her most famous work, a fictional novel titled Reuben Sachs, “satirized the stereotypes and hypocrisy of the Victorian society by using the Jewish community as a microcosm,” Beckman said.“The assumptions about Jews [in the novel] are meant to be taken as popular misconceptions about Jews rather than as the views of Levy herself.” But both the Jewish and non-Jewish community read into the work as if Levy was splashing her opinions across the page, and many contemporaries denounced her as an anti-Semite.

“I’ve studied the book to death, and I don’t think she was doing that,” Beckman said, “although I could see how it was taken as such. I believe she thought people were more sophisticated than they really were.”

Beckman said other works by Levy expressed the same theme as Reuben Sachs without focusing on the Jewish community, but those were not as popular. Beckman’s book, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters, which reveals more about Levy’s life and literary works, was published in 2000.