Reuben Sachs: A Sketch (Broadview Editions) - Softcover

Susan David Bernstein is a Professor of English, Jewish Studies, and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

“Susan David Bernstein has done Victorian studies a great service with this edition of Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs. Bernstein’s original research, insightful commentary, and wide ranging selection of appendices provide a detailed view of the many cultural discourses that surrounded Levy’s work. Thus, with this one volume, readers can discover this important Anglo-Jewish writer and also have enough source materials to contextualize Levy in the critical histories of Anglo-Jewish literature, women’s writing, and late Victorian England. I feel as if I have been waiting for this volume for ten years.” ― Cynthia Scheinberg, Mills College

“This is an extremely welcome reissue of a complex and fascinating novel. Susan David Bernstein’s illuminating introduction persuasively demonstrates how to read Amy Levy’s fiction as an expression of the ‘double-consciousness’ of the semi-assimilated Victorian Jew. This edition provides superb sources that illustrate the extent and terms of contemporary controversy about the novel, and document the debates around racial science, ethnic politics, and the woman question that find expression in her writing. Bernstein also includes other examples of Levy’s fiction, poetry, and criticism that engage in troubled and unresolved ways with similar themes of Jewish identity and feminism.” ― Nadia Valman, University of Southampton