Pioneering writer's archive to be opened for first time in 136 years

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

- Nadia Khomami Arts and culture correspondent

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.

Cambridge University has said 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 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.”

Levy was born in 1861 into a middle-class Jewish family in London, and entered Newnham College, Cambridge in 1879, becoming only the second Jewish woman among Cambridge’s first generation of female students.