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Amy Levy
Amy Levy (1862 - 89), poet and novelist, was a member of the New Woman circle in 1880s London. She was part of a group of women, including Schreiner and Eleanor Marx, who met and congregated in the Reading Room of the British Museum (now the British Library). After Levys suicide in 1889 Schreiner wrote to Edward Carpenter, My dear friend Amy Levy had died the night before. She killed herself by shutting herself up in a room with charcoal. We were away together for three days last week. But it did not seem to help her; her agony had gone past human help. In 1892 the Pall Mall Gazette published a false allegation which, although expressed in terms of lady novelists, clearly referred to Amy Levys suicide in 1889 and implied that there had been some kind of pact between Schreiner and Levy but which Schreiner failed to follow through on (see Pall Mall Gazette 1 April 1892, p.2).
For further information see:
Linda Hunt Beckman (2000) Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters Ohio University Press
Linda Hunt Beckman (2004) Levy, Amy Judith (1861-1889) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford University Press http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16559
Donna Hetherington (2011) I am too much shut in with the personal: Representations of Public Love and Private Death in the Case of Amy Levy in Liz Stanley (ed) Olive Schreiner & Company: Schreiners Letters and Drinking in the External World, Working Papers on Letters, Letterness & Epistolary Networks, Number 3 Edinburgh: Olive Schreiner Letters Project (download from http://www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk/OSandCompany2011PDF.pdf)
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