1. Amy Levy, ‘Jewish Humour’ in The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, 1861–1889, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 523.
2. Emma Francis, ‘Amy Levy: Contradictions? Feminism and Semitic Discourse’ in Armstrong and Blain, Women’s Poetry, 183–204. Cynthia Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 190.
3. Katie Solomon, ‘Letters to the Editor’, The Observer (7 July 1929): 10. Levy’s friend could be Dorothy Frances Blomfield (b.1858), who became in the late 1880s one of Levy’s closest friends. She was the eldest daughter of the Reverend F. G. Blomfield, who was himself the eldest son of the first Bishop Blomfield, a Rector of St Andrews. She wrote a hymn for her sister’s wedding in 1885 which became so successful that it was subsequently set up as an anthem for the marriage of the Duke of Fife with Princess Louise of Wales. British Library, MS. Add. 57507 ff.188–190v. She was, like Levy, a contributor to The Woman’s World, edited by Oscar Wilde (see for example her poem ‘A Roman Love–Song’ [The Woman’s World (1888): 363] or ‘Disillusioned’ [The Woman’s World (1889): 352]), though she is perhaps best known for her transgressive short story ‘The Reputation of Mademoiselle Claude’, Temple Bar 74 (July 1885): 358–70. Blomfield also befriended Vernon Lee, who invited her to become her brother’s [the poet Eugene Lee–Hamilton] secretary in 1893. See Vernon Lee, Vernon Lee’s Letters, ed. with a Preface by her Executor I. Cooper Willis (privately printed, 1937), 345–6. Christine Pullen, however, suggests this was the novelist Bertha Thomas. See Christine Pullen, Amy Levy: Her Life, Her Poetry and the Era of the New Woman (PhD, University of Kingston–upon–Thames, 2000), 106.
4. Thesing, The London Muse, 149. For an examination of late–Victorian women poets and the sonnet see Natalie M. Houston, ‘Towards a New History: Fin–de–Siècle Women Poets and the Sonnet’ in Victorian Women Poets edited by Alison Chapman (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, The English Association, 2003), 145–64.
5. Amy Levy, Xantippe and Other Verse (Cambridge: E. Johnson, 1881), 19–21.