Amy Levy was born in London in 1861, and following schooling at Brighton High School for Girls became the first Jewish student to gain a place at Newnham College, Cambridge (although she only studied there for two terms). Her first book, Xantippe and other poems, was published in 1880, while she was still at Cambridge. After she had left Newnham, she began to earn her living as a writer and to move in the circles of radical women in London; she was a friend of Eleanor Marx, Olive Schreiner and the feminist campaigner Clementina Black. Oscar Wilde admired her work and published her journalism in his Woman's World magazine. She wrote three novels, one of which, Reuben Sachs (1888; translated into German by Eleanor Marx), was controversial for its attack on contemporary Jewish life. She committed suicide in 1889 at the age of twenty-seven. Her last collection of poems, A London Plane-Tree and other verse, for which she had corrected the proofs before her death, was published posthumously.