Amy Levy was a late-nineteenth-century British writer whose short life produced three novels, three collections of poetry, and numerous short stories and essays. She was active in the 1880s intellectual culture of Bloomsbury and acquainted with such figures as Olive Schreiner, Vernon Lee, the Black sisters, Eleanor Marx and Grant Allen. Levy's scholarly and creative writings reflect a keen awareness of contemporary literary and cultural movements, often prefiguring discussions regarding feminism and modernism which would not take place until after her death in 1889. In 1883, Levy published an essay in The Cambridge Review on the writings of James ‘B.V.’ Thomson, author of epic poem ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ (1874-1880). Levy observed of Thomson that

The narrative perspective that Levy alludes to here, a literary mode that eschews omniscience and distanced objectivity in favour of a ‘passionate’ partiality, is a technique she would later adopt in her third and final collection of poetry published in 1889 shortly after her death, A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse.