Listen to audio

Stream (help)

128kbps M3U (Hi-Fi)
64Kbps M3U (Lo-Fi)

Play / Download (help)

(110.8 M)64Kbps MP3 ZIP

Resources

Amy LevyReuben Sachs (January 22, 2008)

Would you like to try our new video/audio player ? (beta!)

Librivox recording of Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy.
Read by Adrian Praetzellis.

Reuben Sachs is a London lawyer whose political aspirations do not include marriage to Judith Quixano, the daughter of a respectable but unexceptional family. But without Reuben, a woman like Judith might have a bleak future in mid-19th century England: a loveless marriage or lifelong dependancy are apparently her only options...

A feminist, a Jew, and a lesbian, Amy Levy wrote about Anglo-Jewish cultural mores and the lives of would-be independent women in Victorian society. Levy was as repelled by contemporary literature's occasional paragon (e.g., Daniel Deronda) as by its more frequent anti-Semitic stereotypes. REUBEN SACHS was her attempt at an honest, warts-and-all account of middle class Jewish life in late-19th century London. While many of Levy's contemporaries condemned the book as a shanda fur die goyim (an embarassment), Oscar Wilde wrote: "Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make REUBEN SACHS, in some sort, a classic." Amy Levy (1861-1889) was born in London and educated in Brighton and at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her social set included Beatrix Potter and Eleanor Marx, with whom she studied in the British Museum Reading Room, and lover Vernon Lee (Violet Padget). (Summary by Adrian Praetzellis)

For more free audiobooks, or to become a volunteer reader, please visit librivox.org.

M4B format available


This audio is part of the collection: The LibriVox Free Audiobook Collection
It also belongs to collections: Audio Books & Poetry; Community Audio

Artist/Composer: Amy Levy
Date: 2008-01-22
Source: Librivox recording of a public-domain text
Keywords: librivox; audiobooks; fiction; Jewish life; 19th century London

Creative Commons license: Public Domain

Individual Files

Be the first to write a review
Downloaded 4,858 times Reviews