SOURCE: "Amy Levy and the 'Jewish Novel': Representing Jewish Life in the Victorian Period," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XXVI, No. 3, Fall, 1994, pp. 235-53.

In the following essay, Hunt examines Levy's novel Reuben Sachs as a critique of prevailing representations of Jewish life in Victorian literature.

In the last month of 1888 Macmillan brought out what was to become a controversial novel within the Jewish community on both sides of the Atlantic. Amy Levy, a twenty-seven-year-old Jewish woman who had already made something of a name for herself as a writer of poetry, non-fictional prose, and fiction, was the author of this book, Reuben Sachs. It was her first published work of fiction about Jewish life. The question of how to represent Jews in fiction had evidently been on her mind for a long time, for in 1886 Levy had published in the weekly Jewish Chronicle an article, "The...