Miss Meredith , livre ebook
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2020
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Publié par
Date de parution
07 décembre 2020
Nombre de lectures
1
EAN13
9781528791533
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
Publié par
Date de parution
07 décembre 2020
Nombre de lectures
1
EAN13
9781528791533
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
MISS MEREDITH
By
AMY LEVY
WITH A BIOGRAPHY BY RICHARD GARNETT
First published in 1889
Copyright © 2020 Read & Co. Classics
This edition is published by Read & Co. Classics, an imprint of Read & Co.
This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd. For more information visit www.readandcobooks.co.uk
Contents
AMY LEVY
By Ric hard Garnett
CHAPTER I
A FA MILY OF FOUR
CHAPTER II
A GREAT EVENT
CHAPTER III
NEW AND STRANGE EXPERIENCES
CHAPTER IV
THE NEW GOVERNESS A ND HER PUPIL
CHAPTER V
MA KING FRIENDS
CHAPTER VI
COSTAN ZA MARCHETTI
CHAPTER VII
THE HOME-COMING OF THE REBEL
CHAPTER VIII
AN ITALIAN BALL
CHAPTER IX
"WHAT HAS HAPP ENED TO ME?"
CHAPTER X
"AS G OOD AS GOLD"
CHAPTER XI
"WILL YOU MAKE ME VERY HAPPY?"
CHAPTER XII
THE BREAKING OF THE STORM
CHAPTER XIII
A SKILFUL DIPLOMATIST
CHAPTER XIV
RELEASED FROM HER VOW
AMY LEVY
By Richard Garnett
AMY LEVY (1861–1889), poetess and novelist, second daughter of Mr. Lewis Levy, by his wife Isabelle [Levin], was born at Clapham on 10 Nov. 1861. Her parents were of the J ewish faith.
She was educated at Brighton, and afterwards at Newnham College, Cambridge. She early showed decided talent, especially for poetry, pieces afterwards thought worthy of preservation having been written in her thir teenth year.
In 1881 a small pamphlet of verse from her pen, ‘Xantippe and other poems,’ was printed at Cambridge. Most of the contents were subsequently incorporated with her second publication, A Minor Poet and Other Verse, (1884). ‘Xantippe’ is in many respects her most powerful production, exhibiting a passionate rhetoric and a keen, piercing dialectic, exceedingly remarkable in so young a writer. It is a defence of Socrates's maligned wife, from the woman's point of view, full of tragic pathos, and only short of complete success from its frequent reproduction of the manner of both the Brownings. The same may be said of ‘A Minor Poet,’ a poem now more interesting than when it was written, from its evident prefigurement of the melancholy fate of the authoress herself. The most important pieces in the volume are in blank verse, too colloquial to be finely modulated, but always terse and nervous. A London Plane Tree and other Poems , (1889), is, on the other hand, chiefly lyrical. Most of the pieces are individually beautiful; as a collection they weary with their monotony of sadness. The authoress responded more readily to painful than to pleasurable emotions, and this incapacity for pleasure was a more serious trouble than her sensitiveness to pain: it deprived her of the encouragement she might have received from the success which, after a fortunate essay with a minor work of fiction, The Romance of a Shop , attended her remarkable novel, Reuben Sachs , (1889). This is a most powerful work, alike in the condensed tragedy of the main action, the striking portraiture of the principal characters, and the keen satire of the less refined aspects of Jewish society. It brought upon the authoress much unpleasant criticism, which, however, was far from affecting her spirits to the ext ent alleged.
In the summer of 1889 she published a pretty, and for once cheerful story, Miss Meredith , but within a week after correcting her latest volume of poems for the press, she died by her own hand in her parents' house, 7 Endsleigh Gardens, London, 10 Sept. 1889. No cause can or need be assigned for this lamentable event except constitutional melancholy, intensified by painful losses in her own family, increasing deafness, and probably the apprehension of insanity, combined with a total inability to derive pleasure or consolation from the extraneous circumstances which would have brightened the lives of most others. She was indeed frequently gay and animated, but her cheerfulness was but a passing mood that merely gilded her habitual melancholy, without diminishing it by a particle, while sadness grew upon her steadily, in spite of flattering success and the sympathy of affection ate friends.
Her writings offer few traces of the usual immaturity of precocious talent; they are carefully constructed and highly finished, and the sudden advance made in Reuben Sachs indicates a great reserve of undeveloped power. She was the anonymous translator of Pérés's clever brochure, Comme quoi Napoléon n'a ja mais existé .
A Bi ography from Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-190 0, Volume 33
MISS MEREDITH
CHAPTER I
A FAMILY OF FOUR
It was about a week after Christmas, and we—my mother, my two sisters, and myself—were sitting, as usual, in the parlour of the little house at Islington. Tea was over, and Jenny had possession of the table, where she was engaged in making a watercolour sketch of still life by the light of the lamp, whose rays fell effectively on her bent head with its aureole of Titian-coloured hair—the delight of the Slade school—and on her round, earnest young face as she lifted it from time to time in contemplation of her subject.
My mother had drawn her chair close to the fire, for the night was very cold, and the fitful crimson beams played about her worn, serene, and gentle face, under its widow's cap, as she bent over the sewing i n her hands.
A hard fight with fortune had been my mother's from the day when, a girl of eighteen, she had left a comfortable home to marry my father for love. Poverty and sickness—those two redoubtable dragons—had stood ever in the path. Now, even the love which had been by her side for so many years, and helped to comfort them, had vanished into the unknown. But I do not think she was unhappy. The crown of a woman's life was hers; her children rose up and calle d her blest.
At her feet sat my eldest sister, Rosalind, entirely absorbed in correcting a bundle of proof-sheets which had arrived that morning from Temple Bar . Rosalind was the genius of the family, a full-blown London B.A., who occasionally supplemented her earnings as coach and lecturer by writing for the magazines. She had been engaged, moreover, for the last year or two, to a clever young journalist, Hubert Andrews by name, and the lovers were beginning to look forward to a speedy termination to their period of waiting.
I, Elsie Meredith, who was neither literary nor artistic, neither picturesque like Jenny nor clever like Rosalind, whose middle place in the family had always struck me as a fit symbol of my own mediocrity—I, alone of all these busy people, was sitting idle. Lounging in the arm-chair which faced my mother's, I twisted and retwisted, rolled and unrolled, read and reread a letter which had arrived for me that morning, and whose contents I had been engaged in revolving in my mind through out the day.
"Well, Elsie," said my mother at last, looking up with a smile from her work, "have you come to any decision, after all this har d thinking?"
"I suppose it will be 'Yes,'" I answered rather dolefully; "Mrs. Gray seems to think it a quite unusual opportunity." And I turned again to the letter, which contained an offer of an engagement for me as governess in the family of the Marchesa Bro gi, at Pisa.
"I should certainly say 'Go,'" put in Rosalind, lifting her dark expressive face from her proofs; "if it were not for Hubert I should almost feel inclined to go myself. You will gain all sorts of experience, receive all sorts of new impressions. You are shockingly ill-paid at Miss Cumberland's, and these people offer a very fair salary. And if you don't like it, it is always open to you to come back."
"We should all miss you very much, Elsie," added my mother; "but if it is for your good, why, there is no more to be said."
"Oh, of course we should miss her horribly," cried Rosalind, in her impetuous fashion, gathering together the scattered proof-sheets as she spoke; "you mustn't think we want to get rid of you." And the little thoughtful pucker between her straight brows disappeared as she laid her hand with a smile on my knee. I pressed the inky, characteristic fingers in my own. I am neither literary nor artistic, as I said before, but I have a little talent for being fon d of people.
"I'm sure I don't know what I shall do without you," put in Jenny, in her deliberate, serious way, making round, grey eyes at me across the lamplight. "It isn't that you are such a good critic, Elsie, but you have a sort of feeling for art which helps one more than you have a ny idea of."
I received very meekly this qualified compliment, without revealing the humiliating fact that my feeling for art had probably less to do with the matter than my sympathy with the artist; then observed, "It seems much waste, for me, of all of us, to be the first to g o to Italy."
"I would rather go to Paris," said Jenny, who belonged, at this stage of her career, to a very advanced school of æsthetics, and looked upon Raphael as rather out of date. "If only some one would buy my picture I would have a year at Julian's; it would be the ma king
