Reuben Sachs - Softcover

Amy Levy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1903155126 ISBN 13: 9781903155127

Publisher: Persephone Books Ltd, 2001

Synopsis

This 1888 novel is about a couple who love each other, but his political ambitions demand money and she is poor. "Reuben Sachs" would be a fairly standard late-Victorian novel about the cruelty of the marriage market if it were not imbued with feminist polemic. Amy Levy (1861-89) was sharply critical of the empty lives led by women with nothing to do all day except gossip, play cards and go shopping. The setting is the Anglo-Jewish community in Bayswater, portrayed with a sardonic gaze that shocked contemporary readers. Yet the author's theme was broader, for she was in part reacting against Daniel Deronda: she believed that George Eliot had romanticised her Jewish characters and that no novelist had yet described the modern Jew with 'his surprising virtues and no less surprising vices.'Oscar Wilde observed: 'Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make "Reuben Sachs", in some sort, a classic'.Julia Neuberger writes in her Preface, 'This is a novel about women, and Jewish women, about families, and Jewish families, about snobbishness, and Jewish snobbishness'; while in the "Independent on Sunday", Lisa Allardice said: 'Sadder but no less sparkling than Miss Pettigrew, "Reuben Sachs" is another forgotten classic by an accomplished female novelist. Amy Levy might be described as a Jewish Jane Austen.'

About this title

Review:

'Sadder but no less sparkling than Miss Pettigrew, this spirited satire is infused with a gentle melancholy.' -- The Independent on Sunday March 2001, Lisa Allardice

About the Author:

Susan David Bernstein is a Professor of English, Jewish Studies, and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

About this edition

• Publisher: Persephone Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1903155126
• ISBN 13: 9781903155127
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 198