What, have I waked again? I never thought To see the rosy dawn, or ev’n this grey, Dull, solemn stillness, ere the dawn has come. The lamp burns low; low burns the lamp of life:
Although “Xantippe: A Fragment” was published in 1880, nine years before Levy’s death in 1889, the poem already reveals the emotional turmoil that resulted in her long-standing, though undiagnosed, clinical depression. In these lines, Amy Levy gives a haunting voice to a figure who feels emotionally drained, as if her life’s flame were dimming. The imagery of a “lamp of life” burning low, mixed with the weariness of waking, resonates with Levy’s own recurring bouts of melancholic depression. As a young Jewish woman navigating the male-dominated intellectual circles of Victorian England, Levy often felt like an outsider, both socially and spiritually. According to the Jewish Women’s Archive (2021), a friend and confidant, Richard Garnett, described her as having "constitutional melancholy." By channeling that profound exhaustion through Xantippe, she not only critiques the silencing of women, but also reveals personal anxieties about her own worth, agency, and artistic survival.
