RD: Hi Nancy, what a pleasure it is to speak to you about your wonderful short story ‘An Anniversary Visit’. I wonder if you could begin by telling readers about the origins of this story?
NL: My current work-in-progress is a short novel about Eleanor Marx (1855-1898), Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, who is virtually unknown in the United States. In addition to her crucial work with British unions and the international socialist movement, I was drawn to her feminism and strong identification with her Jewish heritage. She organized poor Jewish immigrants, spoke out against anti-Semitism, and forged warm friendships with many Jews, including Amy Levy, a poet and fiction writer whose work is witty, original, and often beautiful. Their backgrounds and pursuits were different but the challenges they faced were similar. This story, although it takes place a year after Amy’s death, is one small way of exploring that relationship.
RD: Stylistically, there’s an extraordinary reserve to the piece which seems to reflect the ritual and precision of the characters – there’s a real sense of the emotions of the individuals (in particular, the mother’s) contained beneath a careful decorum which does, at times, break free beautifully (the giggling ‘like schoolgirls’ springs to mind). Could you speak about that?
NL: The reserve is partly from Isabelle Levy’s natural reticence but also from the awkwardness of the situation. On the surface, Isabelle Levy and Eleanor Marx have even less in common than Amy and Eleanor. Neither woman knows what to expect from this meeting. Isabelle, Amy’s mother, is still grieving and looking for answers; Eleanor feels guilt about not being there for her friend Amy in the months leading up to Amy’s suicide. The invitation from her friend’s mother is one she cannot refuse, but she faces it with as much trepidation and uncertainty as Isabelle.
RD: The narrator, Eleanor Marx, observes that ‘Mothers’ love we take for granted; a father’s esteem is harder won. Understanding that his daughter has something to contribute.’ Do you think this bears truth, even today?
NL: According to a June 2025 Gallup International poll, the strong preference (especially among fathers) for male offspring is eroding; in the U.S. and the UK, it persists in about 20% of the population. I don’t know Lewis Levy’s reaction when his first two children (out of seven) were girls; Marx rued the birth of yet another daughter but by the time she was two, found her a ‘remarkably witty fellow [who] insists she has got two brains.’ Free public education for girls in Britain did not exist at the time, yet Lewis Levy and Karl Marx championed their daughters’ education. Amy attended Brighton High School for Girls and Newnham College. Eleanor was home-schooled by her father and by Engels. After Amy’s death, at least one Victorian novelist and eugenicist, Grant Allen, insisted that “overeducation” led to her suicide – a view that thankfully I do not hear today.
RD: There’s an academic slant to your work – does this reflect your own life and interests in any way?
NL: I earned an M.A. in English lit (having dropped out of a Ph.D. program) and after that, spent over 30 years practicing law in New York City. Poetry and other literature show up in my writing regularly. I also enjoy research, not simply for my historical fiction. For a flash fiction about a fly who witnesses weeks of domestic violence, I researched the lifespan of the common housefly. (Contrary to myth, it’s not 24 hours.) While not exactly reflecting an academic slant, poetry from my childhood appears often in my stories.Robert Frost’s ‘The Pasture’ plays a part in ‘A Simple Case’. Henry S. Leigh’s ‘The Twins’ which my father recited often at my request, since it was the funniest poem I’d ever heard, appears in a story about a woman visiting her twin sister in prison, ‘Matchbox’. And references to King Lear and Hamlet show up in a flash fiction about a funeral gone awry, ‘In Memory of Maisie,’ published in the Shakespeare issue of New Orleans Review.
RD: The short story has a range of themes – cultural, sexual, social – and I wonder if you’d be happy to expand on these? Were there particular aspects of Amy Levy’s life (and her reality) that you particularly wanted to include?
NL: Had she not died so young, I believe Amy Levy would have been one of the most important poets of the late Victorian era and possibly, one of its major novelists as well. The critical reception of her third novel, published when she was 26 years old, Reuben Sachs, with its sharp satire of the Jewish community, reminds me of how some readers and critics viewed Philip Roth’s early work. Roth became one of the great American writers of the twentieth-century, with his mature work increasing in scope, compassion, and depth of feeling.
Amy Levy had that compassion and depth of feeling in her 20’s. Oscar Wilde, who published her stories in his magazine, in his posthumous tribute admired her work for its ‘sincerity, directness, and melancholy’. He praised her poems for the absence of a ‘single superfluous line’ and her novel Reuben Sachs similarly for the absence of a ‘single superfluous word.’
From a feminist perspective, her work is quietly revolutionary. Her epic poem Xantippe, published when she was 20, and narrated by Socrates’ bitter and much-maligned wife, foreshadows Carol Ann Duffy’s 1999 collection, The World’s Wife, a collection of poems giving voice to the unseen women in classic stories. Near the end of Reuben Sachs, Judith, having learned of Reuben’s unexpected death, despairs that she will never meet him again in the street, ‘see his face, hear his voice.’ She looks out the window, and the next passage sounds eerily like Virginia Woolf:
‘On the pavement the people gathered, thicker and thicker. A pair of lovers moved along slowly, close against the park railings, beneath the shadow of the trees.
The pulses of the great city beat and throbbed; the great tide roared and flowed ever onward.’
When we think of Amy’s personal afflictions – hearing loss, neuralgia, chronic depression –we recognize that today, there are medical advances that might have helped her. Other pressures were (and to some extent remain) part of the social fabric, including anti-Semitism and misogyny, both of which she experienced throughout her adult life. At school and at Newnham, many fellow students shunned her because she was Jewish. She left Newnham perhaps partly for that reason, but also because it did not award degrees to women and possibly for financial reasons as well. Surprisingly, having supported a daughter at university, Lewis Levy was not willing or able to do the same for his sons. During her European travels after leaving Cambridge, Amy picked up what work she could, mostly tutoring, so as not to be a burden on her parents.
In 1897, sixteen years after she left Newnham, and eight years after her death, a rule change was proposed to allow Newnham students, all women, to formally graduate from Cambridge University. Male Cambridge students rioted in protest. It was not until 1948 that Newnham students were able to receive Cambridge University degrees.
In spite of these circumstances, and in spite of the melancholy and sincerity Wilde writes about, Amy’s poetry and prose frequently vibrate with her playful wit. It’s there in one of the poems I quote in the story ‘A Wall Flower’ and in the line that Isabelle and Eleanor recite together from Reuben Sachs. Other poems touch ever so lightly on the longed-for woman who isn’t there, such as ‘London in July’ and ‘A Game of Lawn Tennis.’
A principal challenge writing the story was to make Amy and her writing live through the conversation between Isabelle and Eleanor even though Amy is not present. Most of all, I hope the story will lead readers to explore more of her work.
RD: Your novel, Sarra Copia: A Locked-in Life is set in sixteenth and seventeenth century, Venice. Are you often drawn to writing historical fiction and what would you say are the major challenges or concerns when writing about the past?
NL: My move towards historical fiction grew in part as a response to criticism within the literary community focused on what writers are or are not permitted to write about. Too often I saw writers silenced or accused of ‘appropriation’ if they wrote about experiences outside the narrow sphere of their own lives. Historical fiction by its very nature is writing about an era in which you did not live and people you do not know.
Historical fiction lets me bring to light overlooked individuals, particularly women, who deserve to be better known. ‘The Loneliness Cure,’ my first foray in the genre, won Orison Books’ short fiction prize and was published in Best Spiritual Literature, Vol. 7 (2022). It’s based on the life of a teen-age girl in early 1800’s Ukraine, Hannah Rochel Verbermacher, who became a Hasidic rabbi. The story is narrated by Hannah Rochel’s best friend, Tirza, who became one of her followers. Sarra Copia: A Locked-in Life (WTAW Press 2023), is based on the life of the Sarra Copia (1592-1643), whom I first learned about when I visited the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Lido in Venice. Like all Jews in Venice at the time, she was required to live in the ghetto, but was allowed to venture outside the ghetto walls from sunrise to sunset so long as she wore a yellow head-covering that identified her as a Jew. Sarra hosted a literary salon in the ghetto attended regularly by Catholic poets, priests, and intellectuals. She wrote poetry, corresponded for years with a poet who lived in a monastery in Genoa, and bravely defended herself against public charges of heresy brought by a Catholic priest, a regular attendee at her salon.
One major challenge in writing historical fiction is deciding who should tell the story. In ‘The Loneliness Cure’ I chose a close friend of Hannah Rochel, and the nature of their friendship becomes an important part of the narrative. In Sarra Copia: A Locked-in Life, Sarra herself tells her story, which begins when she is eight years old.
My work-in-progress about Eleanor Marx is told by multiple narrators.
There is so much written about Eleanor, including two excellent and comprehensive biographies published in the UK by Yvonne Kapp and Rachel Holmes, respectively, and other biographical works by Chushichi Tsuzuki and Deborah Lavin that take fascinating perspectives. In addition, there are thousands of pages of contemporaneous writings by Eleanor and members of her circle as well as her father and Engels and other admirers about Eleanor.
I struggled to figure out who should narrate Eleanor’s story. I soon learned that from infancy Eleanor loved cats and had them as cherished pets all her life. (Her nickname from childhood was Tussy, to rhyme with ‘pussy’). Her cats clamored to tell her story and I had no choice but to let them. They are astute commentators on late Victorian England and highly opinionated about everything from her father’s philosophy to her relationships with family and friends (including Amy Levy). They also offer feline perspectives on the status of cats (and how to improve it) in London and elsewhere.
RD: I’m curious to know what you would ask either Amy or Eleanor if you had the chance to meet them? And what, I wonder, do you think they would say?
NL: The questions I would ask Amy are the same her grieving mother asks.
As for Eleanor: You and some of your readers may know that some eight years after the events in the story, Eleanor was found dead in her bedroom in Sydenham; the verdict at the inquest was suicide. The inquest was exceedingly sloppy. I would ask Eleanor two questions: first, what happened behind the closed doors of her bedroom that day; and second, for which of all her extraordinary accomplishments she wishes to be remembered.
Although I cannot share it here (she has not granted permission), Eleanor’s cat Minnie, who narrates the final section of my book, was in the house on the day of Eleanor’s death and has her own view of who killed Eleanor.
RD: Finally, what is it, do you think, that draws people to writing? And how does it shape who we are?
NL: I write to find out what I know but don’t yet know I know. In exploring the hearts and minds of my characters, I come to better understand myself and others. Like many writers, I loved reading as a kid. My mother worked as a children’s librarian in Harlem and although she stopped working outside the home soon after becoming pregnant with my older brother, her love of books and Shakespeare (like my father’s love of poetry) infused my early life.
Writing and researching historical fiction in particular enables me to learn and write about individuals many readers have never heard of, people who were not simply extraordinary for their time but for all time. By engaging readers with their stories, I express my gratitude for their lives.
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Read Nancy Ludmerer’s short story ‘The Anniversary Visit’ here.
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Nancy Ludmerer has published over 100 stories in such places as Kenyon Review, Litro (print and online), North American Review, Best Spiritual Literature, and Fish Anthology. Her work has appeared twice in Best Small Fictions and other stories have been translated into Spanish and read on public radio. Her debut collection, Collateral Damage: 48 Stories (Snake Nation Press 2022), received SNP’s annual fiction prize, and her novella, Sarra Copia: A Locked-in Life (WTAW Press 2023), set in seventeenth-century Venice, was a finalist for WTAW’s Alcove Prize. She lives in NYC. Learn more at www.nancyludmerer.com
Rupert Dastur is founding editor of TSS Publishing. His debut novel Cloudless was published by Penguin in 2025.