Names on the buses

363 Amy Levy

Connections with Brighton and Hove : Amy Judith Levy (1861–1889) was a Jewish intellectual, novelist, and poet born in Clapham, London. She attended Brighton High School in 1875 and later became the first Jewish woman to join Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1881. Though she did not complete her degree, she was part of a group of progressive women, including writers and translators Clementina and Constance Black. Levy was deeply engaged in London’s Bohemian literary circles, where she met figures such as Eleanor Marx and Olive Schreiner. She faced opposition for her feminist views and her relationships with women. Struggling with increasing deafness and long-term depression, she tragically took her own life in 1889 at her parents’ home in Bloomsbury. Unusually for the time, she was cremated, and Oscar Wilde wrote her obituary in Woman’s World. It is said that her attitudes and writings influenced the growing Modernist movement at the time personified by the writings of Virginia Woolf and WB Yeats; both with strong Sussex connections.

ADL Enviro 363 carried name since December 2024.