The aim of literature lies not only in the unfolding of human beings’ lives and their ambience but also in creating awareness about certain shortcomings and incongruities which require rethinking and reconsideration. Andrea Levy seems to be following the above-mentioned aim of writing literature. Levy has experienced the transitional period when white Britain came to know of its multiracial identity, coinciding with a period of social unrest. In 1958, the Notting Hill riots broke out. Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968 and Brixton riots in 1981 left a deep impact on Levy’s psyche. She had been sometimes the only black girl in her school. This offered her the experience, the life-research, which she uses for her characters Olive, Vivien, Angela, and Faith. Levy came to her serious reading in her twenties. She first went to black North American writers such as Toni Morrison and Audre Lourde. She also fed herself with feminist writers like Michael Robert and Zoe Fairbrain of England. James Baldwin changed her outlook on fiction, the politics of fiction. Levy is the author of five novels, each of which is a diary of her thought and experience realistically drawn. She is forthright in an interview, “All my books have been about trying to understand who I am and the position I am in; when I say I’m English, it’s not an act of patriotism, it’s almost an act of defiance” (Fischer 2005). Her early novels, written in the genre of the female Bildungsroman, show the influence of black women’s writings with its emphasis on what Smith (2000, 5) refers to as a “woman-identified art.”
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