To+Vernon+Lee,+Amy+Levy

Anglo-Jewish poet Amy Levy’s poem, "To Vernon Lee" was published in 1889 (Luke). The poem is written in tribute to female author Violet Page whom Levy had met and become fond of on a trip to Florence, Italy. Vernon Lee was the pen name of Violet Page. "To Vernon Lee" was one of a few love poems that Levy sent to Page. Through out the 19th century it was not surprising for women to write about another woman. It may have been through the act of praising another poetess or as Levy does, praising the relationship with another woman. The poem is focused on the romantic relationship between the two women.

"To Vernon Lee" is a very short poem in which Levy describes her encounter with Page. In Levy's poem she writes, “On Bellosguardo, when the year was young” (Levy 1147). Bellosguardo was a hill in Florence where the two had met. The poem expresses the homosexual relationship through the small acts that each woman pursues for the other: “ You broke a branch and gave it to me there;/ I found for you a scarlet blossom rare” (Levy). The last 3 lines of the poem focus around conversations that happen between the two on the day they met. The conversations included how God gifted each one along with the discussion of life wishes. Levy is descriptive in her writing and she uses imagery to describe the scenery: "Over the grey, low wall the olive flung Her deeper greyness; far off, hill on hill Sloped to the sky, which, pearly-pale and still, Above the large and luminous landscape hung" (5-8) The poem is told from Levy's perspective. It is evident to be a first person narrative due to the use of 'I', 'me' and 'you'. Similar to other poetesses of the era, Levy's "To Vernon Lee" is a rather daring poem. This is because the tone of the poem comes across as melancholic yet the event she discusses is a positive one. Levy’s upbringing was different from other families of the 19th century because her parents decided to educate the girls rather than the boys (Shires, 152), which was different for an era that focused around marriage and family. Due to Levy’s education as a child, she was “the first Jewish woman to matriculate at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1879” (152). It wasn’t until Levy had attended boarding school where she had found herself having romantic crushes on other women (152). However, many scholars debate if Levy was actually a lesbian. In the biography work called //Amy Levy: Her life and Letters,// Linda Beckman, argues that Levy’s love poems are all written from a woman’s perspective towards another woman rather than a man addressing a woman. Although Levy wrote many love poems, she suffered from depression. Unfortunately, at the age of twenty-seven, Levy committed suicide (151), which was a common way of death for Victorian era poetesses as they were depressed. Due to her Jewish heritage it was unusual for a body to be cremated but this was on her own request (151).

Violet Page, who wrote under the pseudonym Vernon Lee, plays an important role in Levy’s life. In an article Vernon Lee: New Woman? by Sondeep Kandola, quotes Ethel Smith's comment that Page’s sexuality is defined as “a repressed lesbian who claimed that she pursued women solely for the purposes of intellectual sustenance”(Smyth, cited in Kandola,471). Kandola is not the only critic interested in Page’s sexuality. An article by Sally Newman called "The Archival Traces of Desire: Vernon Lee’s Failed Sexuality and Interpretation of Letters in Lesbian History" it notes that Page had two main lovers: Kit Anstruther-Thomson and Mary Robinson. Although these women are noted as Page’s lovers, scholars still argue if she was indeed a lesbian. Scholars such as Newman and Kandola, consistently “describe her as a failed lesbian” (Newman 55). Again, Ethel Smith discussed how she rejected to face the point about womanly affection. Page even shunned physical contact with women. Due to Page’s confused sexuality, she comes across as homophobic. Page has a confused sexuality because she did not want to be known as a lesbian. Newman makes a good point in her article: “so powerful have these representations of Lee’s failed sexuality been that they still circulate without any examination of the foundational assumptions upon which they rest” (57).

Works Cited Beckman, Linda Hunt. "Amy Levy: Her life and Letters". //Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature//. 55 vol. 2000. Print.

Devine, Luke. "The Ghetto At Florence: Reading Jewish Identity In Amy Levy's Early Poetry", 1880-86." Prooftexts 31.1/2 (2011): 1-30. Web. 28 Jan. 2015. Web.

Kandola, Sondeep. "Vernon Lee: New Woman?" //Women's Writing// 12.3 (2005): 471-84. Online.

Levy, Amy. “To Vernon Lee”. The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory. Ed. Thomas J. Collins & Vivienne J. Rundle. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press Ltd, 1999. 1147-1148. Print.

Newman, Sally. "The Archival Traces of Desire: Vernon Lee's Failed Sexuality and the Interpretation of Letters in Lesbian History." Journal of the History of Sexuality 14.1/2 (2005, 2006): 51-75.Web.

Shires, Linda M. Rev. of Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters by Linda Hunt Beckman. Victorian Studies. 44 Vol. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.Online.

JP/Uvic/Engl386/Winter2015