A 19th-century gay erotic novel that has been associated with Oscar Wilde is set for wider dissemination after it was acquired at auction by a Canadian university following a PhD student’s crowd-funding campaign.

Teleny, anonymously published in 1893, describes the erotic relationship between two men – Camille Des Grieux, who has “always struggled against the inclinations of my nature”, and Rene Teleny. Its prequel Des Grieux was published in 1899. The authorship of Teleny was first attributed to Wilde decades later by the French bookseller Charles Hirsch, who had opened a London shop in 1889, and who counted Wilde among his customers.

The copy of Teleny sold at auction. Photograph: Don Erhardt/PR

Hirsch claimed in 1934 that in 1890 Wilde had arrived at his shop with a manuscript, carefully wrapped, which he asked the bookseller to take care of. It was subsequently collected and returned by a series of young men, and when Hirsch unwrapped it, he found the manuscript of Teleny, written by several different authors.

Only a handful of copies of Teleny and its prequel remain, with authorship still uncertain. Although Teleny has been widely republished – sometimes under Wilde’s name – Des Grieux is almost wholly unknown to scholars. Justin O’Hearn, a PhD candidate in Victorian literature at the University of British Columbia, hopes to change that, after his Kickstarter campaign helped raise the money to acquire both titles when they went up for auction at Christie’s.

O’Hearn ended up raising more than $3,000 (£2,000) from a range of backers, with the University of British Columbia’s library contributing the remaining money to purchase both volumes, Des Grieux for $23,000, and Teleny for $16,000. He now plans to transcribe and edit what he has described as the “first ever modern edition” of Des Grieux, “so as to disseminate the work as widely as possible for general readers and scholars alike”. O’Hearn has previously edited and published Letters from Laura and Eveline, an 1883 erotic novel.

“Remember, this text has only been seen by a small number of people and anyone interested in it cannot, at present, obtain a copy of it. I only have the slightest idea of what it contains based on second-hand accounts by people granted access to private collections,” he wrote on his Kickstarter page.

UBC described the works as “two exceptional examples of early gay literature”, with Gregory Mackie, assistant professor in the English department at the university, saying that “even if Wilde didn’t write them, the speculation is still a fascinating part of his enduring mythology”. Christie’s itself only goes as far as saying that Teleny is “sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde”, adding that the authorship “remains uncertain, and is more likely to have been a collaborative effort”. Des Grieux, says Christie’s, is a “rare” and “important homoerotic text” written by the same hand as Teleny, with no copy formerly in any institution.

Michael Seeney, deputy chair of the Oscar Wilde Society, said on Monday that “some work on Des Grieux would be useful”, as “nobody has really done anything on Des Grieux because it’s not a common book”. But he was unsure if study would move forward the question of the works’ authors. “[Wilde’s involvement] is not corroborated by anybody else but obviously it made for a good story, when Hirsch published a new edition of [Teleny] in 1934,” said Seeney of Teleny. “The only other time Wilde’s name was mentioned in common with it before 1934 was by [occultist] Aleister Crowley.” Crowley, says Christie’s, was “convinced” of Wilde’s role, writing that “with the exception of Verlaine in Hombres, and Wilde in Teleny … nobody in modern times has dared to voice openly … the passion between man and man”.

“Most people would agree it was not written by one person – stylistically it’s all over the place. I think it’s perfectly possible Wilde could have been involved in some way- if I think it’s probable, is another matter,” said Seeney of Teleny.

One of Wilde’s best known works, The Picture of Dorian Grey, “is not an explicit book, whatever some of the critics thought at the time,” said Seeney, whereas Teleny “is pretty explicit, and I don’t know whether Wilde would have been bothered with writing something like that.”

But he suggested that “some of his friends might have done, and he might have felt like putting it into better language”.

O’Hearn told Publishers Weekly: “One of my goals with this project was just to make these texts available, because no one has ever seen [them] until now.”

He added that both novels are explicit in their coverage of sexual relationships. “All types of sex are depicted in both of these books. But the homosexuality is the thing that makes it unique, because no book until that point had really dealt with it in a straightforward way,” he told the US magazine. “It’s blush-worthy, the things that are depicted.”