{"id":174,"date":"2019-05-10T17:33:39","date_gmt":"2019-05-10T17:33:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/provincialenglish\/chapter\/andrea-levy\/"},"modified":"2019-08-28T19:22:07","modified_gmt":"2019-08-28T19:22:07","slug":"andrea-levy","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/provincialenglish\/chapter\/andrea-levy\/","title":{"raw":"Andrea Levy (1956\u20132019)","rendered":"Andrea Levy (1956\u20132019)"},"content":{"raw":"

Biography<\/h1>\nAndrea Levy was an English novelist, born in London to\u00a0Jamaican parents who sailed to England\u00a0in 1948. Levy's novels frequently explore topics related to members of the Jamaican diaspora in England and the ways in which they negotiate racial, cultural, and national identities.\n\nAndrea Levy was of primarily\u00a0Afro-Jamaican\u00a0descent. She had a\u00a0Jewish\u00a0paternal grandfather and a\u00a0Scots\u00a0maternal great-grandfather.\n\nGrowing up on a council estate in\u00a0Highbury, London, she attended Highbury Hill Grammar School,\u00a0\"ate a lot of sweets, watched a lot of soap operas and 'lived the life of an ordinary London working-class girl.'\u201d\u00a0In her mid-20s, she worked for a social institution where she encountered racist attacks. She also worked part-time in the costume departments of the\u00a0BBC\u00a0and the\u00a0Royal Opera House\u00a0while starting a graphic design company with her husband, Bill Mayblin. During this time, she experienced a form of awakening to her identity concerning both her gender and her race. She also became aware of the power of books and began to read \"excessively\": it was easy enough to find literature by\u00a0black\u00a0writers from the United States, but she could find very little literature from\u00a0black\u00a0writers in the United Kingdom.\n\nLevy began writing only in her mid-30s, having enrolled in\u00a0a creative writing class at the\u00a0City Lit\u00a0in 1989, continuing on the course for seven years.\n\nWhen Levy's first novel, the semi-autobiographical\u00a0Every Light in the House Burnin\u2032<\/em>, was published in 1994, it attracted favourable reviews.\n\nLevy's second novel,\u00a0Never Far from Nowhere<\/em>\u00a0(1996), is a\u00a0coming-of-age story\u00a0about two sisters of Jamaican parentage growing up in London in the 1970s. The novel is narrated from the perspectives of Vivian and Olive and chronicles their difficulties living in 1970s England. The narrative focuses specifically on the physical differences between the sisters in terms of skin colour, eye colour, and hair type, which causes them to be treated differently by British people, and the ways in which they negotiate and constitute racial and national identities. The novel was long-listed for the\u00a0Orange Prize for Fiction. After its publication, Levy visited Jamaica for the first time, and what she learned of her family's past provided material for her next book.\n\nFruit of the Lemon<\/em>\u00a0(1999), a novel set in England and Jamaica in the\u00a0Thatcher\u00a0era, \"explores the notion of home, and how it differs for the formerly colonized and their descendants,\" as\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0noted. \"Though Levy writes specifically about black Jamaican Britons and their struggles to be acknowledged as full members of the larger society, her novel illuminates the general situation facing all children of postcolonial immigrants across the West, from the\u00a0banlieue\u00a0of France to the Islamic neighborhoods of New York to the Hispanic ghettos of\u00a0Los Angeles.\"\n\nLevy's fourth novel,\u00a0Small Island<\/em>\u00a0(2004), put her in a new major literary league.\u00a0As\u00a0Mike Phillips wrote in\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>: \"Small Island<\/em> is a great read, delivering the sort of pleasure which has been the traditional stock-in-trade of a long line of English novelists. It's honest, skilful, thoughtful and important. This is Andrea Levy's big book.\"<\/a>\u00a0It won three prestigious awards:\u00a0Whitbread Book of the Year, the Orange Prize, and the\u00a0Commonwealth Writers' Prize. The novel was subsequently made into a two-part\u00a0television drama that was broadcast by the BBC in December 2009.\n\nLevy's fifth novel,\u00a0The Long Song<\/em>, won the 2011\u00a0Walter Scott Prize\u00a0and was shortlisted for the 2010\u00a0Man Booker Prize.\u00a0The Daily Telegraph<\/em>\u00a0called it a \"sensational novel... [that] tells the life story of July, a slave girl living on a sugar plantation in 1830s Jamaica just as\u00a0emancipation\u00a0is juddering into action.\"\u00a0Kate Kellaway\u00a0in\u00a0The Observer<\/em>\u00a0commented: \"The Long Song<\/em>\u00a0reads with the sort of ebullient effortlessness that can only be won by hard work.\"\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0reviewer, calling it \"insightful and inspired,\" went on to say that the work \"reminds us that she is one of the best historical novelists of her generation.\"\u00a0The Long Song<\/em>\u00a0was adapted as a three-part\u00a0BBC One\u00a0television series that was broadcast in December 2018.\n\nHer short book\u00a0Six Stories and an Essay<\/em>\u00a0was published in 2014,\u00a0described by Katy Guest in\u00a0The Independent<\/em>\u00a0as \"a slight collection, but full of important insights.\"\n\nAndrea Levy died on February 14, 2019.\n

Loose Change<\/h1>\nYou can read the full text here: Andrea Levy's \"Loose Change\" [PDF]<\/a>.\n

Activities<\/h1>\n
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Loose Change<\/p>\n\n<\/header>\n

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Study Questions<\/h2>\n
    \n \t
  1. Describe the narrator. What is her probable profession? Racial origin?<\/li>\n \t
  2. Describe Laylor.<\/li>\n \t
  3. Why do you think Laylor likes the picture of the English ballerina Darcey Bussell (b. 1949)?<\/li>\n \t
  4. Why are Laylor and her brother in London?<\/li>\n \t
  5. The narrator assumes that Laylor had sought her out, \u201csifted [her] from the crowd\u201d? Do you agree? Why or why not? Provide evidence.<\/li>\n \t
  6. How has the narrator\u2019s grandmother changed from when she had been without shelter as an immigrant?<\/li>\n \t
  7. Comment on the ladies who complain of too much froth in their coffee. Why does Levy place this detail at this point in the story?<\/li>\n \t
  8. Why does the narrator decide to be benevolent to Laylor?<\/li>\n \t
  9. Why does she suddenly decide not to help her?<\/li>\n \t
  10. What is the theme of the story?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Activities<\/h2>\n
      \n \t
    1. Log on to the website of the National Portrait Gallery in London<\/a>. Comment on the portrait of Darcey Bussell. Then look at the online portraits of the figures mentioned on this site or elsewhere (mostly contemporary writers such as Bennett, Greer, and Byatt).<\/li>\n \t
    2. Read Katherine Mansfield\u2019s story \u201cA Cup of Tea\u201d (above), which describes a similar encounter between two women; then write an essay comparing\/contrasting Mansfield\u2019s Rosemary Fell and the unnamed protagonist of \u201cLoose Change.\u201d<\/li>\n \t
    3. Look at the various contextual activities provided by the British Council in the kit that accompanies this story at the Teaching English \"Loose Change\" site<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

      Text Attributions<\/h3>\n