Audiobook · read by volunteers
Reuben Sachs: A Sketch
Amy Levy (1861–1889)
Read by Adrian Praetzellis · 10 chapters · 4 h 01
About the book
Reuben Sachs is a rising young lawyer in London’s Jewish upper-middle class, with political ambitions and a sharp sense of what is expected of him. Judith Quixano is his cousin, a woman of intelligence and feeling who belongs to a respectable but unremarkable family. Without a good marriage, her future may be bleak, a loveless match or lifelong dependence. Amy Levy’s short novel, published in 1888, is a sharp and sympathetic portrait of a community seen from within, with its dinners, its ambitions, its charity and its worries about money and status. It was controversial in its time, and it still reads with force. In ten short chapters, one LibriVox volunteer reads for about four hours. It is a short, subtle and sharply observed novel. Its two central figures are drawn with sympathy, wit and a certain severity.
Introduction
Amy Levy lived from 1861 to 1889. She was an English poet and novelist, one of the first Jewish women to attend Cambridge, where she studied at Newnham College. She published poetry, essays and three novels, and she died at the age of twenty-seven, a loss that deprived English literature of a gifted writer. Her work is now being rediscovered, both for its quality and for its picture of the life of a young, educated woman in the 1880s.
Reuben Sachs: A Sketch was published in 1888. It portrays the Anglo-Jewish middle class of London, a community that Levy knew from inside, and it does so with a mixture of affection and criticism. Reuben, a barrister with a place in public life, and Judith, a woman whose prospects depend on marriage, are caught between personal feeling and the expectations of their world. The novel asks what freedom a woman like Judith can hope for in nineteenth-century England, and what a man like Reuben will give up for his ambitions.
When it appeared, the book gave rise to debate, since some members of the Jewish community felt that it presented them unfairly. Levy’s own view was more complicated, and the novel is both a satire and a piece of sympathetic observation. Her style is economical, and she has a gift for dialogue.
The book is divided into ten chapters, each combining a pair of the original numbered sections, for a total of about four hours. A single LibriVox volunteer reads it. It is an excellent choice for those interested in late Victorian fiction, in women writers, and in the history of Anglo-Jewish life. The prose is spare and the scenes well chosen, and the book rewards a second listening once its central relationships are understood.
Public domain
Amy Levy died in 1889: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text