When Xantippe describes her soul as one that “yearned for knowledge,” she describes a desire that classical society discouraged in women. This yearning reflects Amy Levy’s own intellectual ambitions and her struggle to access education in a world that restricted women’s academic opportunities. Levy pushed against these limitations of her time. She became the second Jewish woman ever admitted to Cambridge University and the first Jewish woman to enroll at Newnham College, one of the women’s colleges founded to expand access to higher learning. Levy’s personal experiences with gender barriers enhance her portrayal of Xantippe’s longing. By giving a classical woman, the same thirst for intellectual life that Levy felt as a Victorian woman, the poem creates a bridge between eras. Xantippe’s desire becomes not merely personal but representative of a long history of women whose intellectual aspirations were dismissed or deemed inappropriate. Through this moment of self-revelation, Levy highlights the emotional cost of systemic exclusion and places knowledge-seeking as both a private desire and an act of resistance.

Although “Xantippe: A Fragment” was published in 1880, nine years before Levy’s death in 1889, the poem already reveals the emotional turmoil that resulted in her long-standing, though undiagnosed, clinical depression. In these lines, Amy Levy gives a haunting voice to a figure who feels emotionally drained, as if her life’s flame were dimming. The imagery of a “lamp of life” burning low, mixed with the weariness of waking, resonates with Levy’s own recurring bouts of melancholic depression. As a young Jewish woman navigating the male-dominated intellectual circles of Victorian England, Levy often felt like an outsider, both socially and spiritually. According to the Jewish Women’s Archive (2021), a friend and confidant, Richard Garnett, described her as having "constitutional melancholy." By channeling that profound exhaustion through Xantippe, she not only critiques the silencing of women, but also reveals personal anxieties about her own worth, agency, and artistic survival.