Sappho in Lyric IV: Michael Field’s Spatial Poetics of Desire and Defeat

In this article, I offer a close reading of Michael Field’s Long Ago (1889), specifically of lyric IV, with the primary aim of showing how Katharine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper appropriate the archaic figure of Sappho, dramatise her Ovidian romantic tragedy and, in so doing, reconceptualise the notional category of spacein two complementary ways: on the one hand, lyric space becomes a tense locus of contention between form-as-hope and content-as-despair and, on the other, the correlation established between space, nature and gender results in a transgressive topography in which, as I conclude, a new Sappho emerges both as a tragic heroine and as an extremely possessive consciousness laden with sheer Hegelian desire.

‘The Eyes of an Intellectual Vampire’: Michael Field, Vernon Lee and Female Masculinities in Late Victorian Aestheticism

This article reframes debate on the intersections of female aestheticism and cultural dissidence by focusing on the construction of queer masculinities at the end of the nineteenth century. Looking at the diary of Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), it examines the descriptions of Vernon Lee, Clementina (‘Kit’) Anstruther-Thompson and Maud Cruttwell during the Fields’ trip to Italy in 1895. The ambivalent presentation of these figures in the diary reveals a conflicted legacy of aestheticism, centred around the inheritance, interpretation and embodiment of queer masculinity. The article argues that the Fields developed themes associated with a previous generation of male aesthetes in order to articulate gender difference between themselves and other female-bodied aesthetes. In particular, it considers how the gender-variant Fields rejected Lee, Anstruther-Thomson and Cruttwell’s trans-masculinities as perversions of their sex.

Michael Field’s "Long ago" (1889) as a paradigm of intertextual theory: from strangeness to metaxology

En el presente artículo, pretendemos abordar la pregunta de cómo Katherine Bradley y Edith Cooper articulan su íntimo diálogo con la poesía de Safo en su primer poemario, Long Ago (1889), publicado bajo el pseudónimo de Michael Field. La respuesta que proponemos para este interrogante se desarrolla en una profunda reflexión que interpreta Long Ago como un texto denso y audaz donde se revisa y se reubica la ontología del arte literario en posiciones ambivalentes. La conclusión primordial a que llegamos es que el poemario en sí representa todo un paradigma de teoría intertextual aplicada que propicia encuentros complejos, inestables y fértiles ente el inglés y el griego, lo traducible y lo sublime, lo dependiente y lo emancipado, lo mimético y lo original, lo empático y lo distante, lo reparativo y lo fragmentario, lo presente y lo ausente, el ante-tipo y el tipo, lo inmanente y lo transtextual.

Adept Sailing before the Storm

Woolf's next two diary books, her 1932 diary and her 1933–34 diary, help her to navigate the difficult strait between the outer and the inner conflicts. She needs these diaries’ support, for, as the gathering outer storm forms, she faces both the strains of her inner artistic self and the loss of her friends. In late November of 1933, she consciously turns from the troubling outer world to the dual-voiced diary of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the aunt and niece verse dramatists who published together under the name Michael Field. There, she finds not only lesbian playwrights and their trials but also the word “outsiders.” In February 1934, her response to a famous travel diary—Arthur Young’s Travels in France during the years 1787, 1788, 1789—shows her recoil from war.

Michael Field’s Fragrant Imagination

This chapter establishes the importance of perfume to Michael Field, the female aesthetes Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, and shows how it plays a significant role both in the poetry produced by Bradley and in entries in the women’s shared diary, especially those written by Cooper. Often exchanged in the form of gifts and scented flowers, perfume is strongly associated by both women with love but also with poetic creativity, as in Bradley’s verse, which celebrates her tender amatory feelings for Cooper but also her deep affection for the artist Charles Ricketts. The chapter concludes with a reading of one of Bradley’s most accomplished poems, which can be regarded as a poetic scented signature, expressing the essence of Michael Field.

Love Triangle with Dog: Whym Chow, the “Michael Fields,” and the Poetic Potential of Human-Animal Bonds

Boggs focuses on a volume of poetry titled Whym Chow: Flame of Love, which was published pseudonymously by Michael Field in 1914. While Victorian and queer studies have focused on other works produced by this author, who was actually two women—Katherine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper, both friends with Robert Browning—less attention has been paid to their later privately-published volume that commemorates their dog who had passed away several years before, a Chow named Whym. Boggs finds great potential in the poems for complicating theoretical explorations of “dog love”, and for rethinking subjectivity and kinship, particularly in terms of the queer potential of human-animal relationships. Rather than reading the poems as examples of anthropomorphism and a privileging of the human over the animal, Boggs sees them as deconstructing these distinctions, with the dog Whym as an “equal partner”.

Lyric, Aestheticism and the Later Nineteenth Century

Chapter 1 offers important historical and conceptual contexts for the late nineteenth century. The chapter suggests that ‘aestheticist lyric poetry’ might be usefully conceptualised ‘through the twin impetuses of conceptual expansion and formal reduction’. It then goes on to outline the context of ‘cultural modernity’, to which it is suggested aestheticist lyric poetry is responding, in order to define further the ‘crisis’ in lyric. It also introduces the three conceptual frames that set the remit for the three parts of the book; these are three key axes around which lyric poetry operates: time, space and subjectivity. Chapter 1 ends with a preliminary case study from the work of ‘Michael Field’ (the assumed name of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) to demonstrate in practice the relevance of the three frames to aestheticist poetry.

Michael Field’s “A Dance of Death”

The 1912 poem "A Dance of Death" by Michael Field (pen name of Katherine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper) depicts Salome in an alternate version of the biblical story: this Salome dances on a frozen river, falls through the ice, and is decapitated on a jagged edge. Nonetheless, her beautiful head continues dancing over the frozen river. This poem is highly unusual, especially in the context of the other poems in the postconversion volume Poems of Adoration, because it questions, rather than submits to, authority. In re-writing a familiar Christian tale, as well as a familiar decadent theme, Field uses the poem to assert the supremacy of their artistic vision, which (despite their ardent Catholicism) cannot be subject to any law outside themselves. Like the continually dancing head of Salome, which continues to create beauty even after nature (and perhaps God) has struck it down, the poet is subjugate only to her own law and creates without boundaries or restrictions on her art. Bradley and Cooper were acutely aware of their authorial persona (actively taking not only a masculine but also a singular poetic identity), and their mode of reconciling the apparent contradictions of this identity are mirrored in their presentation of Salome in a "Dance of Death."

DISABILITY AND GENDER IN THE VISUAL FIELD: SEEING THE SUBTERRANEAN LIVES OF MICHAEL FIELD'S WILLIAM RUFUS

When the UK'sGuardiannewspaper featured “La Gioconda” as poem of the week in January 2010, the paper's popular readership discovered what many late-Victorian scholars had known about for some time: the poetic partnership of Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), known as “Michael Field.” The successful recovery of the Fields as significant late-Victorian writers – a project now in its second decade – seems poised to emerge into popular awareness driven as much by interest in their unconventional love affair as by the poetry itself. Scholars too have been seduced by the romance of a transgressive love story, and the critical nexus between sexuality and textuality has produced remarkable scholarship on the Fields’ lyric poetry: those texts in which the personas have a rough equivalence with Bradley and Cooper themselves. Yopie Prins first noted the complex engagement of multiple voices with lyric structure in Long Ago (74–111), and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Women Poets 175–95), Jill Ehnenn (73–96), and Hilary Fraser (553–56) expanded on this to uncover the transformation of the lyric's male gaze into a triangulated lesbian vision in Sight and Song (1892). In contrast to the recognition accorded their lyric verse, most critics have overlooked Michael Field's verse dramas. While there have been attempts to shift attention onto the plays, the significance of the Fields’ lesbian vision to the dramas has never been explored. This article seeks to redress this pervasive neglect and begin dismantling the boundaries that have grown up between critical approaches to the lyrics and the plays.