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.

Sappho, Hegel and Michael Field: Paradox and desire in lyric III

This article offers a close reading of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s lyric III in Long Ago, a Sapphic volume of verse published in 1889 under the collaborative nom de plume of Michael Field. This collection articulates a dramatic inquiry into the tragedy of unrequited love in a long cycle of lyrics whose third piece most effectively encapsulates the kernel of what the Fields reconstruct as Sappho’s ambivalent eroticism. The outcome of this reconstruction, as analysed in light of lyric III, is a consistent Hegelian view of desire that subsumes a complex system of tropes, myths, paradoxes and imaginative strategies under an overarching ideology of desire as a radical experience of appropriation, violence and self-destruction.

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.

Perfumed Melodies, Violet Memories

This chapter focuses on the fragrance of single flower—the violet—which although often associated with the modest Victorian maiden, has an alternative literary genealogy that links its scent not just to memory, death, mourning, and remembrance, but also specifically to music and poetry. After tracking its influential literary origins in Shakespeare and Bacon, the chapter shows how violet scent encrypts memories of Shelley and Keats that haunt the Victorian imagination, and traces that memorial scent as it permeates various later Victorian lyrics to be finally expressed in a sonnet of 1901 by Katharine Bradley, the older half of the poetic couple who write as Michael Field.

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.