We Are Michael Field, and: The Michael Field Catalogue: A Book of Lists (review)

“Poets and lovers” Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote together under the name “Michael Field,” and their contemporary admirers, Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne, and George Meredith, all believed that “Michael will be discovered in the 20^th century” (qtd. in Treby 129). If the twentieth century is proving slow to discover the extraordinary depths of these prolific high priestesses of poetry, it may be because the conjunction between lesbian and Victorian studies is still a tricky one. Emma Donoghue’s biography and Ivor C. Treby’s reference book demonstrate this point in two very different ways. Donoghue’s We Are Michael Field is part of Absolute Press’s Outlines series which profiles lesbian and gay artists, exploring the effect of their sexuality on their work. Treby’s catalogue is a far cry from such a project, waging war against what he unashamedly villifies as “the sweaty sheet fantasies of certain modern tribades” (65), warning off “academics hoping to bolster a petty, politically ‘correct’ thesis” (11).

Designed for the general reader, We Are Michael Field is informal in style, but Donoghue, who is both scholar and novelist, writes with precision and insight. She offers her book as a stop-gap measure, acknowledging that it is not the “long critical biography” —conspicuously lacking from literary studies—that Bradley and Cooper deserve. It is, rather, a “short, personal study of the intertwined lives of a couple who—as people, and as writers—have come to haunt” her (9). The ghostly voices of Bradley and Cooper are preserved in the miraculously intact thirty-six volumes of their diaries, lodged in the British Library. Critical and biographical work on Michael Field has hitherto relied upon a single volume of extracts published as Works and Days in 1933. Donoghue, however, journeys through the complete journals, presenting them as “a unique document of a writing life” (47) central to elucidating “most of the mysteries” (8) surrounding the two remarkable women.

While Donoghue’s use of the journals fleshes out our biographical sense of the Fields, her close readings of key diary passages also fill in some scholarly oversights. Scholars have often, for example, extracted the Fields’ assertion that they were “closer married” than the Brownings, theorising nineteenth-century lesbian passion from this “metaphor.” Donoghue quotes the rest of the entry: “Oh! Love [. . .] those two poets, man and wife, wrote alone; each wrote, but did not bless or quicken one another at their work; we are closer married.” She points out that “Katherine’s two verbs, ‘bless’ and ‘quicken’ (to become pregnant), are highly sexual. They suggest that the Michaels’ personal and professional collaboration was fertile in several senses” (43). In this way, Donoghue demonstrates how the Fields viewed their sexual union as inextricable from their poetic collaboration.

This is a critical issue. Michael Field formed the turf for the famous battling out of theoretical differences in lesbian studies between Lillian Faderman and Chris White. White challenged Faderman’s desexualised “Romantic Friendship Hypothesis,” proposing instead a “pro-sex investigation into lesbian history” which read the Fields’ declaration to be “poets and lovers evermore” as “an implicitly political understanding of women as lovers, rather than a private and personal retreat from the world into romantic friendship” (“Poets and Lovers Evermore” Textual Practice 4:2 [1990]). Donoghue responds to this critical tug-of-war with cogent descriptions of the contradictory yet strategic ways in which the Fields themselves connected textual and sexual practices. Yopie Prins has stressed the importance of “tracing the public articulation of lesbian as a social category in Victorian England, particularly by the end of the century when the figure of Sappho is increasingly lesbianized” (“A Metaphorical Field” Victorian Poetry 33:1 [1995]) and Donoghue concurs that “[the Fields’] was a particularly interesting transitional lesbian generation” (29), pointing out that their sapphic verses...