'A girl of genius': archives unsealed of Amy Levy, queer Jewish writer admired by Oscar Wilde

For one of Victorian literature’s most distinctive voices, who was once hailed as a genius by Oscar Wilde, very little has been known about Amy Levy for more than a century.

But audiences will now have the opportunity to become more deeply acquainted with a writer whose pioneering work explored women’s independence, Jewish identity and same-sex desire.

The University of Cambridge has announced it has acquired and for the first time unsealed Levy’s personal archive, including letters, draft manuscripts, photographs and diary entries. It is expected the material will inform a wealth of new scholarship on her life, work and mental health.

“It’s rare nowadays for a coherent corpus of a 19th-century author’s papers to come to light,” said John Wells, senior archivist at the Cambridge University Library. “We were determined to take the opportunity to make her archive available in the place where she studied and where she visited even in the last months of her life.”

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