Introduction: Our fourth day will be spent in the Victorian Age, which was the period of legends like Dickens, the Bronte sisters, Thoreau, Twain, Hardy, Darwin and George Eliot (who was actually a woman, ha ha HA chauvanist swine!) This time was when the novel was fully appreciated and lifted to the leading form of literature... and in these novels was the first instances of a particular idea: how even in hard lives, goodness and perseverance would win out in the end and villians suitably punished. Happy endings generally prevailed, although the dwindeled out of fiction after the death of Charles Dickens... who loved happy endings. Almost everyone likes them, yet writers sometimes didn't get them in real life: as we shall explore in our locations below!
Locations: The Life and Death of Amy Levy (1861-1889) Amy Levy was famed for her themes of feminism, suicide, and what she percieved as the "materialistic values and cultural insularity" of nineteenth century Jewish life. Our first location of the morning will bypass her birthplace in Clapham, London to Newnham College of Cambridge University. In approximately 1879, she was the first Jewish woman to ever be admitted into the University. Here, she studied philosophy, translated German poetry and read Greek and Latin. Apart from her studies, she wrote short stories in the four terms she stayed, such as "Leopold Leuinger: A study," "Lallie: A Cambridge Sketch," and "Between Two Stools." But during her twenty seven years of life, she suffered from chronic depression (which was exacerbated by her loneliness, and probable lesbianism)... and as her twenty eighth birthday approached, her slight deafness grew more and more serious. Our second location will be at her home near her parent's in London: it was here, secluded and in the grip of "melancholy", she killed herself by switching on the gas stove and inhaling the lethal fumes. A few streets away from there is where we can have a picnic in the Clapham Common where she often walked, alone in the snow. The rest of the day, our company can split up to explore this fascinating period and its inhabitants individually. We can regroup at the Bleeding Pen: a resteraunt where brooding writers once met to exchange ideas in the shadows, and drown their sorrows in drink.
Above: Amy Levy six months before her death
Above: Clapham Common in winter, the season when Levy died
