Michael Field in Their Time and Ours

I

Hardly any well-published Victorian women writers died in such obscurity as Katharine Harris Bradley (b. 1846-d. 1914) and Edith Emma Cooper (b. 1862-d. 1913): the intimately connected aunt and niece who put into print, mainly at their own expense, no less than eight collections of poetry and twenty-five volumes of verse-drama, most of which appeared under the name of Michael Field. Even fewer, as current scholarship suggests, have been the subject of such concerted reclamation during the past two decades. The recent appearance of four noteworthy volumes—an impressive edition of Bradley and Cooper's love letters, a fine collection of critical essays, a major monograph on their poetry, and a comprehensive selection of their shorter and longer poems—is a sure indication that a fresh generation of readers has found much to admire in the at times outspoken, though often outmoded, works of two women whose legacy went by and large unnoticed after their deaths. What, then, is the contemporary appeal of these coauthors whose long careers involved the almost uninterrupted production of countless writings that attracted decreasing critical attention from their contemporaries? Does recent criticism realize that in many respects Bradley and Cooper, who boldly declared in a brilliant lyric they were "Poets and lovers evermore," were mistakenly ignored in their own age?¹ Does their extensive oeuvre help us pinpoint some of the exclusionary mechanisms that traditionally served to marginalize from the canon many talented English women poets—such as Alice Meynell (b. 1847-d. 1922), Dollie Radford (b. 1858-d. 1920), and Rosamund Marriott Watson (b. 1860-d. 1911)—whose careers developed during the fin-de-siècle and early twentieth century?

Answers to such naturally arising questions can prove difficult to entertain for at least two reasons. First, even though recent scholarship continues to advance our understanding of why Michael Field is an exceptional author whose writings need to be recovered from obscurity, the lack of a sufficiently detailed biography means that it remains hard to understand the complicated shape of Bradley and Cooper's three-decade career, which began in the 1880s by attracting critical praise, involved moving in the 1890s within the social literary world of London, and proceeded in the early 1900s to their growing isolation from everyone except a small circle of loyal friends.² Secondly, the tendency in recent criticism to focus on Michael Field's poetry rather than their verse-plays has produced a skewed understanding of their considerable achievements. More than two-thirds of the works they published during their lifetimes took the form of closet dramas, a genre to which they had an enduring commitment, even though it was—as some of their contemporaries went out of their way to observe—obsolescent. Further, one might go so far as to say that the larger proportion of their poetry that interests modern scholars is both formally and stylistically out of sync with its time, although recent critics seldom comment at length on the noticeably old-fashioned idiom that characterizes much of Michael Field's work.

This neglect is surprising because the complete scope of Bradley and Cooper's poetry and verse-drama bears the marks of a studied antiquarianism that resists what they perceived as the decidedly unaesthetic perils of modernity. Little wonder that they chose to pen fine lyrics about their intimacy in phrasing that sounds transplanted from a much earlier age; one of the best poems in their third collection, Underneath the Bough (1893), begins...