Michael Field (author)

Katherine Bradley

Edith Cooper

Michael Field was a pseudonym used for the poetry and verse drama of Katherine Harris Bradley (27 October 1846 - 26 September 1914) and her niece and ward Edith Emma Cooper (12 January 1862 - 13 December 1913). As Field they wrote around 40 works together, and a long journal Works and Days. Their intention was to keep the pen-name secret, but it became public knowledge, not long after they had confided in their friend Robert Browning.

Biographies

Katherine Bradley was born on 27th October 1846 in Birmingham, England, the daughter of Charles Bradley, a tobacco manufacturer, and of Emma (née Harris). Her grandfather, also Charles Bradley (1785-1845), was a prominent follower and financial backer of prophetess Joanna Southcott and her self-styled successor John "Zion" Ward.^[1] She was educated at the Collège de France and Newnham College, Cambridge.

Bradley's elder sister, Emma, married James Robert Cooper in 1860, and went to live in Kenilworth, where their daughter, Edith Emma Cooper was born on 12th January 1862. Emma Cooper became an invalid for life after the birth of her second daughter, Amy, and Katherine Bradley, being her sister, stepped in to become the legal guardian of her niece Edith Cooper.^[2]

Bradley was for a time involved with Ruskin's utopian project. She published first under the pseudonym Arran Leigh, a nod to Elizabeth Barrett. Edith adopted the name Isla Leigh.

From the late 1870s, when Edith was at University College, Bristol, they agreed to live together and were, over the next 40 years, lesbian lovers,^[3] and co-authors. The first joint publication as Michael Field was in 1884. They had financial independence: Bradley's father Charles Bradley had been in the tobacco industry in Birmingham.

They were Aestheticists, strongly influenced by the thought of Walter Pater. They developed a large circle of literary friends and contacts; in particular painters and life partners Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, near whom they settled in Richmond, London. Robert Browning was also a close friend of theirs, and they knew and admired Oscar Wilde, whose death they bitterly mourned. While they were always well connected, the early critical success was not sustained ( this is often attributed to the joint identity of Field becoming known). They knew many of the aesthetic movement of the 1890s, including Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, J. A. Symonds and also Bernard Berenson. William Rothenstein was a friend.

They wrote a number of passionate love poems to each other, and their name Michael Field was their way of declaring their inseparable oneness. Friends referred to them as the Fields, the Michaels or the Michael Fields. They had a range of pet names for each other. They also were passionately devoted to their pets, in particular a dog named Whym Chow, for whom they wrote a book of poems named after him. This continued a tradition of lesbian couples forming families that included beloved animals - the Ladies of Llangollen had established a similar household.

Their joint journal starts with an account of Bradley's passion for Alfred Gérente, an artist in stained glass and brother of Henri Gérente, who was of an English background but worked mostly in France. It goes on to document Michael Field as a figure, amongst 'his' literary counterparts, and a pet dog. When the latter died in 1906, the emotional pattern of the relationship was disturbed; both women became Roman Catholic converts in 1907. Their religious inclinations are reflected in their later works, where their earlier writing is influenced by classical and Renaissance culture, in its pagan aspects particularly, Sappho as understood by the late Victorians, and perhaps Walter Savage Landor.

Edith died of cancer in 1913, as did Katherine less than a year later. A much-edited selection from the journals, which were two dozen annual volumes in ledgers with aspects of scrapbooks combined with a self-conscious literary style of composition, was prepared by T. Sturge Moore, a friend through his mother Marie.

Works

• The New Minnesinger and other poems (London : Longmans, Green, and Co., 1875) poems by Arran Leigh.
• Bellerophon (C. Kegan Paul, 1881) by Arran and Isla Leigh.
• Callirrhoe & Fair Rosamund (1884) verse dramas.
• The Father's Tragedy (1885) verse drama.
• William Rufus (1885) verse drama.
• Loyalty Or Love? (1885) verse drama.
• Brutus Ultor (1886) verse drama.
• Canute the Great (1887) verse drama.
• The Cup of Water (1887) verse drama.
• Long Ago (1889) poems.
• The Tragic Mary (1890) verse drama.
• Sight and Song (E. Mathews and J. Lane, 1892).
• Stephania, a Trialogue (1892) verse drama.
• A Question of Memory (1893) drama.^[4]
• Underneath the Bough (1893) poems.
• Attila, My Attila] (1896) verse drama.
• World at Auction (1898) Vale Press verse drama.
• Noontide Branches (1899) verse drama.
• Anna Ruina (1899) verse drama.
• Race of Leaves (1901) Vale Press, verse drama.
• Julia Domna (1903) Vale Press, verse drama.
• Borgia (1905) verse drama.
• Wild Honey from Various Thyme (1908) poems.
• Queen Mariamne (1908) verse drama.
• Tragedy of Pardon (1911) verse drama.
• Tristan de Léonois (1911) verse drama.
• Dian (1911) verse drama.
• The Accuser (1911) verse drama.
• A Messiah (1911) verse drama.
• Poems of Adoration (1912).
• Mystic Trees (1913) poems.
• Ras Byzance (1918) verse drama.
• Deirdre (1918) verse drama.
• In The Name Of Time (1919) verse drama.
• Selection (1923).
• The Wattlefold: Unpublished Poems (1930).
• Works and Days: From the Journal of Michael Field, (1933) edited by T. Sturge Moore (unpublished journals are now available on microfilm) kept from 1888, annual to 1914.
• A Shorter Shırazad: 101 Poems of Michael Field (1999) selection by Ivor C. Treby
• Where the Blessed Feet Have Trod - poem.
• Whym Chow: Flame of Love (poems).

Notes

1. ^ Latham, Jackie E. M. The Bradleys of Birmingham: The Unorthodox family of Michael Field (History workshop journal, issue 55).
2. ^ Sturgeon, 1922, pp. 14-17.
3. ^ White, Chris (1992), "'Poets and Lovers Evermore': The poetry and journals of Michael Field", in Bristow, Joseph, Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, Routledge, ISBN 0415069378 
4. ^ Premièred by the Independent Theatre Society, 27 October 1893

Bibliography

• Sturgeon, Mary. Michael Field (George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1922).
• Vanita, Ruth Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (1996)
• Donoghue, Emma We Are Michael Field (Absolute Press, 1998)
• Treby, Ivor C. (ed). The Michael Field Catalogue: A Book of Lists (1998)
• Prins, Yopie Victorian Sappho (1999)
• Treby, Ivor C. Music and Silence: The Gamut of Michael Field (2000)

External links

• Michael Field (Biography and poems - "Isle of Lesbos")
• Michale Field ("The Poetry Foundation")
• Works by or about Michael Field (author) in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Archival material relating to Michael Field (author) listed at the UK National Register of Archives