Katharine Bradley

Poet.

27 October 1846 – 26 September 1914

&

Edith Emma Cooper

Poet.

12 January 1862 – 13 December 1913

A Tribute by Alex Gunn

It is usually said that ‘Michael Field’ was the pen name of two women, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper. But, the truth being rarely pure and never simple—to quote their friend, Oscar Wilde—Michael Field was rather more complex, and indeed more curious, than that.

Bradley and Cooper were aunt and niece, poets, and lifelong lovers: a difficult balancing act in Victorian Britain. Far more than just a nom de plume—though to two such great devotees of literature, the significance of a nom de plume should not be underestimated—‘Michael Field’ was like the shared surname of spouses, only representing an even more total identification, since, on paper at least, they were literally one person.  Bradley said that they were ‘closer married’ even than the poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, since ‘those two poets, man and wife, wrote alone’.  Michael Field, however, wrote, as much as possible, as one—in their verse, their plays, their essays, and even in their extremely detailed twenty-nine-volume diary (Works and Days), which spans the years 1888 to 1914, and switches sometimes paragraph by paragraph between their hands.  Their own poem says it best:

A Girl,

     Her soul a deep-wave pearl

Dim, lucent of all lovely mysteries;

     A face flowered for heart’s ease,

     A brow’s grace soft as seas

     Seen through faint forest-trees:

     A mouth, the lips apart,

Like aspen-leaflets trembling in the breeze

     From her tempestuous heart.

     Such: and our souls so knit,

     I leave a page half-writ—

      The work begun

Will be to heaven’s conception done,

           If she come to it.

Bradley and Cooper’s first book of verse together as Michael Field was Long Ago (1889), a collection of lyric poems based on the fragments of the Ancient Greek poet Sappho, whose love poems to women gave us the words ‘sapphic’ and—after the Isle of Lesbos on which she lived—‘lesbian’. Educated men could find precedent for male same-sex love—and therefore some sense of companionship and comfort in an otherwise hostile world—in Ancient Greek and Roman texts, such as Plato’s Symposium, which they were taught at school and, frequently, at Oxford or Cambridge.  Not having access to the same educational opportunities, however, women were, by default, denied this assembly of ‘dead friends’ (as their friend, the poet Lionel Johnson, put it), and the language for same-sex love that it could provide for men like Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, and gay rights pioneer John Addington Symonds. Though women could not yet take a degree, Bradley was one of the first to attend Newnham College, Cambridge, and later both of them studied at Bristol, in order to learn Greek.  Although female homosexuality was never criminalised in Britain, it was nevertheless generally considered a moral and/or medical sickness, while being a popular subject for male poets such as Charles Baudelaire and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Sappho provided Michael Field, as so many other queer women, with a precedent for female same-sex love. That she had been one of the most revered poets of the ancient world, sometimes even called the ‘tenth Muse’, was all the more reason for them to idolise her. 

Today, it is for their extraordinary lesbian love poetry that Michael Field is best known. It has been crucial to the twenty-first-century revival of interest in Field, as scholars have sought to understand the development of modern ideas of gender and sexuality from their origins (as many argue) in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Yet for all their many collections of short lyric poetry, Michael Field considered themselves to be ‘dramatic poets’—that is, playwrights—and it was Field’s verse drama Callirhoë (1884) that first attracted the attention of the literati. ‘Mr Field’ received eyebrow-raising letters from women and men alike, both under the impression that he was a talented, and hopefully good-looking, young gentleman. 

We may smile, but Michael Field show how complex gender and sexuality could, and can, be. They are usually referred to as women, as if the name ‘Michael Field’ were just a cover, just a way of hiding Field’s (double!) womanhood so that their books would receive a fair trial among readers with set ideas about what, and how, a woman could write. Certainly it was partly that.  But ‘Michael Field’ also indicates a less straightforward relationship with gender than is often acknowledged. In Field’s diaries, we find aunt and niece calling each other a variety of names. Some of these reveal their strange and whimsical sense of humour: Bradley was sometimes ‘A. W. F.’, that is, ‘All Wise Fowl’, and more regularly ‘Sim’, short for ‘Simiorg’, a giant monstrous bird from Persian mythology; Cooper was sometimes ‘P. P.’, that is, ‘Persian Puss’.  Often, though, Bradley was ‘Michael’, and Cooper either ‘Field’ or ‘Henry’. When going by these male names, they usually use he/him pronouns for each other. For instance, when ‘Henry’ arrives at their friends’ house (the artist partners Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon), Bradley writes: ‘He had dressed himself superbly—the rogue—in all his fine, pu[rp]le clothes—his sweeping cock’s plume + furcoat, while poor auntie tore about in a ragged veil + tassel Toque.’  

It is true, however, that after the revelation that Michael Field was not a pretty young gentleman, but an aunt-and-niece duo, their writing was never again so successful. ‘[T]he report of our lady-authorship will dwarf & enfeeble us at every turn’, they wrote to their mentor Robert Browning, who seems to have been the inadvertent spoiler of their secret. ‘[W]e have many things to say the world will not tolerate from a woman’s lips.’ Despite not attaining so much popularity, their later poetry collections, including Underneath the Bough (1893) and Wild Honey from Various Thyme (1908), contain such exquisite poems as ‘A Girl’ (quoted above) and ‘The Mummy Invokes His Soul’, a bizarre sonnet imagining an Egyptian mummy ushering his living soul ‘Down to me quickly, down!’ to meet him in his sarcophagus, ‘for I lust / To break, to crumble—prick with pores this crust!’ 

In 1907, first Cooper and then Bradley converted, like many other artists of the day, to Roman Catholicism. This seems to have been prompted by professional disappointments and a number of personal tragedies, including the loss of Cooper’s father in a hiking accident, followed by her sister Amy to illness, and finally—and perhaps most painfully—their beloved dog, Whym Chow.  Their final poetry collection was Whym Chow: Flame of Love, which Bradley saw through limited publication after Cooper died of cancer in 1914, while suffering from her own final illness. Whym Chow, in fact written entirely by Cooper, is increasingly receiving attention for its astonishing display of love between species: memorably, they liked to think of themselves (Cooper, Bradley, and the dog) as a mirror of the Holy Trinity.  Thanks to Bradley’s meticulous selection of binding, the book also boasts (as Ana Parejo Vadillo has noted) a slightly furry cover.

With age, illness, and despondency, Michael Field became increasingly reclusive. ‘It is possible that life,’ recalled their friend Ricketts, ‘which from the first had been given a second place to the practice of literature, lost daily its hold and reality.’ In their sprightlier years, however, they had been active in many of the important artistic circles of the age. Bradley, in her youth, had been mentored by the art and social critic John Ruskin, until he fell out with her for declaring herself an atheist. As Michael Field, they were close to Robert Browning until his death, and then moved among such celebrated figures as Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, and the pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis. So much for the men. They were also associated with several remarkable women (many of whom were also queer), including critic, author, and art psychology pioneer Vernon Lee; poet and novelist Amy Levy; the polymath designer May Morris (who led Morris & Co. into the twentieth century after her father’s death); their good friend Louie Ellis (sister of Havelock and designer of their clothes); art historian Mary Costelloe Berenson (née Smith), another close friend, thought to have collaborated on or even ghost-written many of Bernard Berenson’s books; and the poet A. Mary F. Robinson. 

Robinson, an acclaimed poet and—until her marriage—almost certainly the lover of Vernon Lee, had in fact been one of those hopefuls who had written to the unknown Michael Field. She was to become one of Field’s chief links to Bloomsbury, her salon introducing them to a number of those listed above.  Like other illustrious female intellectuals, such as Amy Levy and Eleanor Marx, Michael Field also spent a good deal of time in the reading room of the British Museum. Bloomsbury was therefore the source of much of their research for important works including the Egyptian Sonnets and their later dramas.

Passionate, eccentric, tempestuous, devoted: Michael Field were dedicated worshippers of art, their various gods, their beloved pets, and each other.  Their diaries are an unparalleled document of the lives of two queer women (with caveats) at the turn of the century, fascinating and deeply touching.  They were one (or two, depending on your calculations) of the finest poets of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, writing verse that is exacting, innovative, and bold. And they are increasingly receiving the admiration they have always deserved.

Bibliography

Marion Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo (eds), Michael Field, the Poet: Published and Manuscript Materials (Plymouth: Broadview, 2009)

The Diaries of Michael Field Online Edition (Works and Days, 29 vols (1868-1914), London, British Library Add. MSS 46776-46804) <https://michaelfielddiary.dartmouth.edu/home>

Alex Gunn is a Cecil Lubbock Scholar at Trinity College, Oxford, studying for a DPhil on the queer uses of eclecticism in the literary and material cultures of the Victorian Aesthetic Movement.  They completed a BA at Oxford and MPhil at Cambridge with prize-winning dissertations on queer interior decoration and gift-giving in the Aesthetic Movement.  Along with queerness and eclecticism, Alex’s work concerns the uncanny, time travel, essays, and other things that refuse to sit in boxes—as in their academic article on the ‘non-binary aesthetics’ of Charles Lamb, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde, published in the Charles Lamb Bulletin (2021).

Further reading

Ana Parejo Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) 

Ana Parejo Vadillo and Sarah Parker, eds., Michael Field, Decadent Moderns  (Ohio University Press, 2018)

Carolyn Dever, Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diary of Michael Field (Princeton University Press, 2022)

Emma Donoghue, We Are Michael Field (Absolute Press, 1998)

THE LOUVRE

read here by Julia Pascal:

Historic, side-long, implicating eyes;
A smile of velvet’s lustre on the cheek;
Calm lips the smile leads upward; hand that lies
Glowing and soft, the patience in its rest
Of cruelty that waits and doth not seek
For prey; a dusky forehead and a breast
Where twilight touches ripeness amorously:
Behind her, crystal rocks, a sea and skies
Of evanescent blue on cloud and creek;
Landscape that shines suppressive of its zest
For those vicissitudes by which men die.