Wyse family papers, 1816 - circa 1942 | Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The archives of the Wyse family, a prominent Irish literary family of Waterford, Ireland, contain diaries and journals, unpublished literary works, account and letter-books, as well as published volumes and photographs. There is a great deal of literary material, ranging from the poetry, travel accounts, and other papers of Sir Thomas Wyse, a politician and diplomat of the early nineteenth century, to the mid-twentieth century verse of his great-granddaughter, Nellie Bonaparte Wyse.

The most important figure in the collection is Sir Thomas's son, William Charles Bonaparte Wyse, who played an important part in the Provencal literary movement known as the Felibrige. In the collection are many manuscripts with much unpublished poetry, diaries containing copies of correspondence with English, French, Provencal and Catalan writers and accounts of talks with them, scrapbooks with autograph letters from various literary figures, accounts of his reading, with critical remarks, catalogs of his personal library, photograph albums with signed pictures of Provencal and Catalan authors, many with original verse, and letters, as well as his published works, most of which are extremely rare and hard to find.

Correspondents of William Wyse include other writers such as George Meredith, Edmund Gosse, Stephane Mallarme, and the Irish poet Aubrey de Vere, as well as his intimates of many years, Frederic Mistral, Joseph Roumanille, Donnadieu and other felibres of the revival of Provencal poetry in the nineteenth century. His papers provide numerous insights into a movement which has had a major influence upon modern poetry in the English language.