1,721,396 research outputs found
Fashioning Michael Field: Michael Field and Late-Victorian Dress Culture
Get PDFThis article explores how the late-Victorian poets Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote under the collaborative pseudonym Michael Field, used fashionable dress to construct and advertise their unique poetic identity. Using evidence from their journal Works and Days, I contextualise Bradley and Cooper's clothing in terms of late-Victorian dress culture, and the major dress reform movements of the nineteenth century. I demonstrate that Bradley and Cooper used fashion as a distinctively feminine way of participating in aesthetic culture, marking significant life events, and to advertise their poetic identity. This self-fashioning also exposed them to aesthetic scrutiny from their peers Oscar Wilde and Bernard Berenson. Finally, I argue that fashion played a crucial role in Bradley and Cooper's desire for one another – and that this desire can be understood in terms of erotic reciprocity
Edith Cooper’s Sin: Mapping the Willful Bodies of Michael Field
No full textScandal has long been associated with the collaborative partnership of Michael Field (the pseudonym/collaborative identity of Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper): In the 1880s, the English literary world was reportedly scandalized to discover the recently lionized young debut writer, Michael Field, was actually an aunt and niece from suburban Bristol. Rediscovered in the 1990s as lesbian lovers and writers, Bradley and Cooper re-emerged at the forefront of historiography on transgressive sexuality and the nature of female same-sex relationships, and current scholarship has extended this to argue this relationship embraced more complex and fluidly desiring bodies. If LGBTQ+ sexuality is no longer a site of scandal, nevertheless under the surface a modern discomfort with the spectre of aunt-niece incest remains. In some sense, “Michael Field” often represents the bellwether for scholarship on Victorian women writers. Using Sara Ahmed’s theory of wilfullness and digital humanities scholarship on The Diaries of Michael Field this chapter draws on Bickle’s transcription of the 1912 diary, written predominantly by Edith Cooper whilst dying of cancer. This volume, which begins with Cooper’s discussion of her sin in the context of her Catholic conversion and includes a tumultuous penultimate meeting with art historian Bernhard Berenson—central to several of Cooper’s love triangles—grants a unique vision into Cooper’s sense of her own sexuality, and how she viewed the morality of her most intimate relationships
The fowl and the pussycat: Love letters of Michael Field, 1876-1909
No full textMichael Field was the pseudonym used by Katherine Bradley (1846-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913) coauthors and lovers for the poetry and verse drama they published. This edition of the love letters of Michael Field brings together for the first time a personal correspondence thought lost by critics. As the first modern scholarly edition of any of Michael Field's writings, the 168 letters represent a treasure trove of almost untouched manuscript material, including many from the critical early years (1876-1885) of this aunt-niece collaboration. The letters contain both published and unpublished poems and insights into the dramas and their production and are supplemented by extensive annotation and a biographical introduction. Recent critical analysis of poetry and plays written by Michael Field has resulted in more complex interpretations of lesbian textuality, but our understanding of the lives of these poets remains obscured by a pervasive myth of unity. By drawing on previously neglected information about the early lives of Bradley and Cooper made available in these letters, Bickle is able to challenge many current perceptions about the poets' lives. She also shows how the letters provide a context for understanding the development of specific works and for reevaluating the significance of Michael Field as a late-Victorian writer. [from publisher's website
Finding love in the archives: editing the 'lost' love letters of 'Michael Field'
No full textAs 'Michael Field', Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper were the authors of nine volumes of lyric poetry and twenty-five historical verse dramas. In the Britain of the 1880s, the emergence of Michael Field as an exciting new poet was lauded by the literary journals of the period. In this discussion, I will be dealing with the two major collections of Michael Field’s lifewriting held by the British and the Bodleian Libraries
Living 'wilfully': the same-sex marriage ceremony of 'Michael Field' by the Smutt River
No full textThis article focuses on the relationship and life writings of the late- Victorian writing collaboration known as 'Michael Field.' It considers the notion of willfulness developed by Sara Ahmed in Willful Subjects as a way of interpreting Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper ('Michael Field') and their use of willfulness as a productive narrative strategy particularly in the joint diary, 'Works and Days'. This becomes apparent through the examination of the account of Bradley and Cooper’s wedding ceremony by Smutt River, and Bradley's symbolic and Eucharistic absorption of the spirit of Cooper’s dead father James into a new and explicitly willful narrative of their married life in Richmond
Michael Field
No full textPhotograph of Michael Field sitting on a leopard skin rugLeila Kerr (Linington) (Donor
Introduction [Michael Field: Decadent Moderns]
No full textIntroduction [Michael Field: Decadent Moderns
Introduction [Michael Field: Decadent Moderns]
No full textIntroduction [Michael Field: Decadent Moderns
Michael Field : Decadent Moderns
No full textIn the last twenty years, Michael Field has emerged as one of the most fascinating poets of the Victorian era. Through their collaborative partnership as “Michael Field,” Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper engaged in the aesthetic and decadent movements of the fin de siècle, while their poetry and verse drama articulate ideas associated with the New Woman and boldly express queer and lesbian desire. Michael Field: Decadent Moderns extends the focus on these key literary and cultural contexts by emphasizing their continuing significance within twentieth-century literary modernism. Through a series of interdisciplinary essays, this book addresses Michael Field’s energetic engagements with a range of topics including ecology, perfume, tourism, art history, sculpture, formalism, classics, and book history. In doing so, Michael Field: Decadent Moderns highlights the modernity, radicalism, and relevance of their work, both within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as in our own cultural moment.
Contributors: Leire Barrera-Medrano, Joseph Bristow, Jill R. Ehnenn, Sarah E. Kersh, Kristin Mahoney, Catherine Maxwell, Alex Murray, Sarah Parker, Margaret D. Stetz, Kate Thomas, and Ana Parejo Vadillo.https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/1063/thumbnail.jp
Heroines, Anti-Heroines and New Women: The Early Drama of Michael Field, 1884-1895
Get PDFThis thesis represents an analysis of five dramatic works by Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913) who wrote under the collaborative literary pseudonym “Michael Field” for nearly forty years from the late 1800s to their deaths. These are: Callirrhoë (1884), Fair Rosamund (1884), The Tragic Mary (1890), Stephania (1892), and Attila, My Attila! (1895). Although more recently Michael Field’s poetry has become the subject of more academic attention, here is currently little critical work on the Fields’ twenty-seven tragic dramas, and, as yet, no sustained analysis of individual plays. Over the course of five chapters, this thesis takes a new approach to these little known dramas and their eponymous heroines, carefully locating each one within both the context of the Fields’ lives, and the wider socio-cultural and political contexts which surround each play. It is the contention of this thesis, that through their dramatic writing, the Fields were engaging with a wide range of challenging issues, debates and concerns concerning the positioning and construction of middle-class female identity, role and sexuality. Through these analyses then, this study will
consider the development of the Fields’ dramatic writing and identity as female dramatists within the wider social, cultural, literary, economic and political
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