'Michael Field': Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

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‘MICHAEL FIELD’

‘Michael Field’ (1884–1914) was the pseudonym of two women, the aunt and niece Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who lived and wrote together as lovers. The large oeuvre contains poems, dramas and a vast diary. Marion Thain recounts the development of a fascinating and idiosyncratic poetic persona that, she argues, itself became a self-reflexive study in aestheticism. The constructed life and work of ‘Michael Field’ is used here to deepen and complicate our understanding of many of the most distinctive aesthetic debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; a process unified by the recurring engagement with theories of time and history that structures this book. This analysis of poetry, aestheticism and the fin de sie`cle, through the performance of ‘Michael Field’, has implications that reach far beyond an understanding of one poet’s work. Scholars of both Victorian and modernist literature will learn much from this innovative and compelling study. marion thain is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham.

cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture General editor Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge

Editorial board Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London Kate Flint, Rutgers University Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley D. A. Miller, Columbia University J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine Daniel Pick, Birkbeck, University of London Mary Poovey, New York University Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia

Nineteenth-century British literature and culture have been rich fields for interdisciplinary studies. Since the turn of the twentieth century, scholars and critics have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and the visual arts, politics, social organisation, economic life, technical innovations, scientific thought – in short, culture in its broadest sense. In recent years, theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts have unsettled the assumptions of previous scholarly synthesis and called into question the terms of older debates. Whereas the tendency in much past literary critical interpretation was to use the metaphor of culture as ‘background’, feminist, Foucauldian and other analyses have employed more dynamic models that raise questions of power and of circulation. Such developments have reanimated the field. This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies: work which intersects fruitfully with other fields of study such as history, or literary theory, or the history of science. Comparative as well as interdisciplinary approaches are welcomed. A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.

‘MICHAEL FIELD’ Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Sie`cle

MARION THAIN

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521874182 © Marion Thain 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2007 eBook (EBL) ISBN-13 978-0-511-35449-6 ISBN-10 0-511-35449-5 eBook (EBL) hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-87418-2 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-87418-1

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For John and Vivien Thain

Contents

Acknowledgements

page viii

Introduction: ‘something fierce, subtle, strange, singular’

1

The diaries and dramas: life-writing and the temporal patterns of aestheticism

20

Long Ago: the male pseudonym, fin-de-sie`cle sexualities and Sappho’s historical leap

42

Sight and Song: Botticelli and ekphrastic paradox

66

4 Underneath the Bough: dual authorship and lyric song

90

1 2 3

Wild Honey from Various Thyme: apian aestheticism and the lyric book collection

130

6 The Catholic poetry: the spiritual and historical ‘turn’ of the century

168

5

Conclusion: modernism and the fin de sie`cle Notes Bibliography of material by Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper General bibliography Index

vii

201 216 247 252 267

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been written without the enthusiasm of Peggy Reynolds and Kelsey Thornton, who encouraged my interest in this author at its earliest stage, and the more recent support of Gillian Beer and Linda Bree (and the readers for Cambridge University Press). Thanks are also due to Marcus Walsh, former head of the English Department at the University of Birmingham, for actively supporting my research work during those crucial years. I am grateful for the generous help of a community of scholars working on the fin de sie`cle, including: Richard Dellamora (for comments on a draft of Chapter 2), Kate Flint, Linda Hughes, Sally Ledger, Diana Maltz, Fred Roden, Margaret Stetz, and Herbert Tucker (for comments on a draft of Chapter 3), and particularly Ana Parejo Vadillo, for valuable discussion and encouragement. My deepest debt is to a group of people who have been most instrumental in bringing this project to fruition: Joseph Bristow, for help that has been simultaneously vital, practical and inspirational; John Henderson, for intellectual support and friendship that has been so crucial to the completion of the project; Kelsey Thornton for advice on the transcription of some manuscript sources, and endless patience and illuminating answers in response to my many queries about all manner of topics; Gordon Johnson and Wolfson College, Cambridge, for exceptional generosity, and for providing the truly stimulating environment in which this project first took shape. Finally, my profound thanks to Rob Hopkins for everything else, and more. permissions I acknowledge the generosity of many research libraries (and librarians) and individual manuscript owners and copyright holders. For permission to quote from the manuscripts held in their archives, I thank the British viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Library, London; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland; the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; and the Huntington Library, California. My grateful thanks for permissions to reproduce quotations from manuscript sources also go to: Leonie Sturge-Moore and Charmian O’Neil, for the material by Michael Field and Charles Ricketts; the Order of Preachers, for the letters from Michael Field to John Gray; the Dominican Council, for the letters of John Gray to Michael Field; Villa I Tatti, for the letters from Bernhard Berenson to Michael Field; Nicholas Deakin, for material by Havelock Ellis; and HarperCollins, for the letter from John Ruskin to Michael Field. Many thanks to Mark Samuels Lasner – the owner of the photograph of Michael Field used as a frontispiece for this book, and the detail from the cover of Wild Honey used on the jacket design – for permission to use these images, but also for his considerable help in supplying them. Some material included in Chapter 6 was published previously in The Fin-de-Sie`cle Poem, edited by Joseph Bristow (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005); I thank Ohio University Press for permission to use this in an extended and revised version in this book. By the time this book is in print, some material included in Chapter 5 will also be in print within a book of essays on Michael Field edited by Margaret Stetz (Rivendale Press, 2007); my thanks to Rivendale Press for allowing me to use this in a revised fashion and in a different context. Every effort has been made to secure permissions for reproduction where copyrights are still active. If I have failed in any case to trace a copyright holder, I apologise for any apparent negligence and will make the necessary arrangements at the earliest opportunity.

Introduction: ‘something fierce, subtle, strange, singular’

field A region in which a body experiences a force as the result of the presence of some other body or bodies. A field is thus a method of representing the way in which bodies are able to influence each other.1

This definition of ‘field’ from a dictionary of scientific terminology could also be used as a rather apt literary definition of ‘lyric’. If the lyric is a space designed to explore the way in which bodies influence each other textually, ‘Michael Field’ is a created and creative space of lyric production. Bradley and Cooper wrote in an era which resulted in Einstein’s special relativity theory (1905); an era in which the understanding of the relationship between bodies across space and time was changed radically. Michael Field’s lyrics seem to share the urgency of this investigation, and this study will suggest that Bradley and Cooper not only provide but also, crucially, embody a highly inventive resolution to the dialectic between bodies. They do this through the method of the paradox, which underpins the operations of this lyric ‘field’ in both spatial and temporal dimensions. The dual authorship itself is perhaps the most notable ‘spatial’ paradox, and I will be arguing throughout this book that it enables a poetics of presence based on amorphous desire which entails profound consequences for the operation of the Victorian lyric. Even more crucial to the framework of this study, and to its claim for canonical status for the writers’ works, is a temporal paradox through which we can trace Michael Field’s commentary on aestheticist preoccupations with history and time. Recent interest in Michael Field has been driven in key part by the quirkiness of the dual aunt-and-niece authorial persona. Holly Laird encapsulated the flavour of much of this interest when she wrote in 1995, near the beginning of the recent rediscovery of Michael Field’s work, of wanting to enable Michael Field to remain ‘an odd couple on the 1

2

Introduction

not-too-distant horizon’.2 Yet in my book (at the time of writing, this is the first full-length study of Michael Field), I have rather more ambitious plans for the writers. Michael Field is too interesting a part of fin-de-sie`cle aesthetics to remain on any horizon. In fact, the quirks and eccentricities of Michael Field’s work can in many ways be best explained as manifestations of an exaggerated, or extreme, engagement with some of the most vital literary concerns of the age. This characterisation sees the oeuvre as both central to aestheticism3 and simultaneously at its extremities. Yet, as Ada Leverson noticed, this was the age in which the marginal was central.4 Within the space of ‘Michael Field’, Bradley and Cooper come to embody aestheticist ideals, and it is in relation to these ideals that they need to be contextualised. Perhaps looked at in this way they will cease to be the odd couple on the horizon and be seen instead as a rather bold interrogation and interpretation (sometimes an almost deconstructive reductio) of some of the core principles of aestheticism. My attempt to show Bradley and Cooper in this light will be founded, methodologically, on close engagement with Michael Field’s texts, which are so often in danger of taking second place to the fascinating biography. The life of Michael Field is exceptionally well documented, thanks to the survival of Bradley and Cooper’s own copious diaries and letters, a biography by Mary Sturgeon, not to mention the short but lively recent biography by Emma Donoghue.5 A full-length comprehensive new biography of Michael Field needs to be written, but this is not a project which can be subsumed into the critical one I am attempting here. Nonetheless, at this point I do need to outline a very brief sketch of the lives of the aunt and niece. Katharine Harris Bradley was born in Birmingham to the wife of a tobacco manufacturer in 1846. Jonathan Freedman has pointed out that aesthetes tended to be middle class (citing Ruskin as the son of a sherry merchant and William Morris as the offspring of a successful stockbroker), and Bradley and Cooper were, similarly, writers who were not born into the literary scene but who infiltrated it from the prosperous merchant class.6 Katharine’s father died when she was only two years old. She had one sister, Emma, eleven years her elder, who married James Robert Cooper and went to live with him in Kenilworth. It was here that Emma’s daughter, Edith Emma Cooper, was born in 1862. The absence of Katharine’s father undoubtedly provided the impetus for herself and her mother to move to Kenilworth to live with the Coopers around the time of Edith’s birth. But Katharine was soon to play a far more central role within her sister’s family than she could have expected. When Emma Cooper became a permanent invalid

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after the birth of her second daughter, Amy (in 1864), Katharine, at the age of eighteen, became the guardian of her niece Edith. The two were soon inseparable and Katharine became to Edith everything one woman can be to another: mother, aunt, sister, friend and, eventually, lover. The women were of independent means and had a good education. Bradley pursued her literary interests by attending a summer course at Newnham College, Cambridge, and (in 1868) by going to the Colle`ge de France in Paris. In 1878, both women pursued classics and philosophy at University College in Bristol. Mary Sturgeon writes that it was an era when ‘Higher Education and Women’s Rights and Anti-Vivisection were being indignantly championed, and when ‘‘aesthetic dress’’ was being very consciously worn – all by the same kind of people. Katharine and Edith were of that kind’.7 Yet there were also pronounced differences between the women. Although Bradley and Cooper present themselves in their writing as a seamless whole, the women were in fact very different in appearance and character. Bradley was socially warm, exuding the air of robust constitution and good health, while Cooper was always shyer, fragile and prone to illness, if more beautiful. In 1875, Bradley published her first volume of lyrics (The New Minnesinger)8 under the pseudonym Arran Leigh, a name which is deliberately ambiguous in its gender. The next volume of poems to be published, in 1881, marked the beginning of the women’s literary partnership, which was to last for the rest of their lives. Bellerophoˆn (a volume slated by The Academy)9 was presented as the work of two people: ‘Arran and Isla Leigh’.10 ‘John Cooley’ – a combination of ‘Cooper’ and ‘Bradley’ – had also been experimented with as the signature for the first draft of Callirrhoe¨.11 By the time the women began writing together, their relationship was, in Sturgeon’s words, a friendship ‘clearly on the grand scale and in the romantic manner’.12 This budding literary career was positively discouraged by John Ruskin, Bradley’s mentor at this stage in her life. Bradley corresponded with Ruskin and became a companion of his Guild of St George for a while, but a series of letters between the two charts the rift which developed around Christmas 1877.13 In the following letter from Ruskin, one can hear Katharine’s voice in the background, exuberant at obtaining a new pet: Dear Katharine, Your letter telling me you have lost God and found a Skye Terrier is a great grief & amazement to me – I thought so far [insert] much [end insert] better of you. – What do you mean? That you are resolved to receive only good at God’s

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hands and not evil? Send me word clearly what has happened to you – then perhaps I’ll let you talk of your dogs and books. Ever faithfully yours, J. R.14

Indeed, Katharine was only half joking when she claimed to have swapped her religion for a pet dog. The acquisition of this animal inaugurated a new phase of the poets’ life, in which they found their way towards a sensual, pagan and erotic faith, which was very far from Ruskin’s petty and puritanical doctrine. While there is lots of evidence that Christian faith was not banished from their lives as comprehensively as they might claim, Bradley and Cooper do present their lives as structured around a dichotomy between what they described as pagan and Christian modes of being. Both seem in key part to be expressions of the women’s spirituality, which is a constant throughout their lives. The term ‘pagan’ had a multiplicity of connotations at this time, but it does accurately signify the various facets of Michael Field’s life between 1877 and 1907. As a matter of historical accuracy, then, I will use the term ‘pagan’ throughout this book to cover not only the Graeco-Roman non-Christian realm – and its pantheistic religion – which so fascinated the two women, but also those tenets central to Walter Pater’s aestheticism (itself so connected to the ancient world) which structured Bradley and Cooper’s experience at this time, and the ‘perverse’ sexuality (liberal heterosexuality and any homosexually inclined behaviour) which was connected with this lifestyle. Many contemporaneous sources – as well as Michael Field’s own writings – show this particular diversity of usage to be entirely of its age.15 ‘Michael Field’ was born out of this pagan mode of experience, and came into existence with the publication of the verse-drama Callirrhoe¨ in 1884. It was at this time that the women’s literary career began in earnest. ‘Michael Field’ was the name under which they were to establish their literary reputation, and which they used for all subsequent publications (except for those dramas, such as Borgia, which were published anonymously). Bradley even continued to publish under this name after Cooper’s death. The pseudonym came directly from the women’s private articulation of their identity. Fond of nicknames, Katharine was known amongst her friends as ‘Michael’, and Edith was ‘Field’ or ‘Henry’. ‘Michael’ seems to have carried connotations of the archangel, while ‘Field’ has a less obvious significance.16 Clearly, ‘Michael Field’ is a bipartite name signifying not just the name of single, male author, but also two

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5

names of two women authors – and it is for this reason that throughout this book I refer consistently to ‘Michael Field’, rather than simply ‘Field’.17 Callirrhoe¨, which was an instant success, brought the couple to the attention of Robert Browning, and secured his support.18 He took Ruskin’s place as their new literary mentor, and this friendship was to last until Browning’s death, but after the generally very successful reception of Callirrhoe¨, in 1884, Michael Field was never to be so joyously received again. It was only for a very short while that Michael Field was thought to be a single male author. During that time the women received some intense personal interest from other writers who seemed to be looking for intimacy of a kind only made possible by a belief in their masculinity. Andre´ Raffalovich wrote with an enthusiasm which, on his discovery of their true identity, he retracts with a stiff apology: ‘I thought I was writing to a boy, to a young man of my age whose world I appreciated’.19 From A. Mary F. Robinson, ‘Michael Field Esqre’ received, care of their publishers, a flirtatious little missive (postmarked 1885) containing directions to her house and an invitation to call. ‘[N]ext Tuesday afternoon’ is singled out as particularly appropriate because ‘you would find me singularly alone as my mother & sister are gone for a few days to Wales; & no callers generally arrive till after four’. The postscript acknowledges the unorthodoxy of this suggestion, adding: ‘If you think it risking too much to come here, I am not making (am I?) any very American suggestion in proposing to meet you some morning (not Monday) at the National Gallery alone’.20 Some knew, at this stage, that Michael Field was a pseudonym, but didn’t know the identity of the writer; a guessing game ensued, involving some of the great sexological figures of the age and, in turn, linking concerns about the pseudonym with issues of gender and sexuality. Bradley wrote to Cooper: Such a nice letter from Ellis [Havelock Ellis] this morning [ . . . .] An acquaintance of his, from careful examination of internal evidence, is confident that the book is written by a man & a woman. Ellis has another theory – I believe that of single female authorship; but he does not say [ . . . ].21

This quasi-phrenological reading of the contours of Michael Field’s verse is seen to yield very specific conclusions – both wrong. Bradley and Cooper left Bristol in 1888 to move, with their families, to Reigate. Their time at Reigate was both one of exploration and emergence into the public world, but also one in which they devoted themselves more and more to each other and their private realm.22 It was during this

6

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phase of their lives that they travelled in Europe, mainly with the purpose of seeing art of various kinds (during these trips they were sometimes accompanied by friends such as Bernhard Berenson). It was also during this period that they got to know Meredith (who sent them a letter of praise on the publication of Long Ago on 13 June 1889), A. Mary F. Robinson, Richard Garnett, Lionel Johnson, D. G. Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, Herbert Spencer and many other influential figures of the age. But it was the private environment they created for themselves at Reigate that was the focus of their lives. The house saw very few visitors, except for the artists Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, with whom the women gradually became extremely close friends. Bradley and Cooper’s devotion to each other and to their work meant that Michael Field flourished, publishing prolifically. This does not, however, mean that their books were well received. The two great sadnesses for the women at this time were their bad literary reviews and the death of Cooper’s father in 1897 in a mountaineering incident.23 The close friendship with Ricketts and Shannon was to last for twenty years. The poets contributed to the artists’ journal The Dial, and Ricketts published four of the poets’ plays at his own Vale Press, and decorated nearly all of their subsequent books. Michael Field’s books were largely published privately. They were briefly published by Mathews and Lane, but they believed this lost them prestige and they returned to paying for publication.24 Their desire for their books to be beautiful objects was no doubt one of the forces motivating this decision. Indeed, their friendship with Ricketts and Shannon was based around a shared love of handsome objects. Bradley and Cooper showered Ricketts with gifts, while he made finely wrought jewellery for them (now held in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). It was at the suggestion of Charles Ricketts that, in 1899, Bradley and Cooper moved from Reigate to a small Georgian house at 1, The Paragon, Richmond (the first house they were to occupy without other members of their family). It was here they set up home with a rather special flame-coloured chow dog named Whym Chow. Whym Chow was the most important being on earth for Bradley and Cooper. Just as the Skye terrier became symbolic of a move away from institutionalised Christian faith, so their love for Whym Chow enabled him to symbolise a complicated nexus of factors which prompted their entry into the Roman Catholic Church in 1907. While undoubtedly in key part a response to Cooper’s ill-health, aspects of their changing relationship with each other, and historical events, the women attribute their conversion entirely to the death of the beloved Whym Chow (it is

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on this occasion that Cooper writes that it was ‘the worst loss of my life – yes, worse than that of beloved mother or the tragic father’).25 Bradley and Cooper were quite typical of a certain type of Roman convert at the end of the century, being educated, articulate, fairly wealthy and well connected, they were of the type who were able to ‘wield influence in their new community’.26 The women certainly did throw themselves into the Catholic world. Their conversion distanced them from many of their old friends (even Ricketts and Shannon), but opened up important new opportunities with spiritual advisers such as John Gray (himself a Decadent poet turned priest). In February 1911 it was discovered that Cooper had cancer; she died on 13 December 1913. Bradley also died of cancer just under a year later on 26 September 1914. The last few years of their lives were spent reading and learning about theological doctrine, and writing continuously. Poems of Adoration, Cooper’s last work, was published in 1912. Bradley’s companion volume of religious lyrics, Mystic Trees (also her last work), emerged in print the following year. Both appeared under the joint pseudonym and the two were designed to be bound together by a strap to form one complete work. Sensitive to criticism as the women were, it would have hurt them enormously to read the entry on their work which appeared in the Cambridge History of English Literature just after their death, in 1916. The author writes of the ‘curious fancy’ of two women writing in collaboration under one masculine name, and the assessment of their work is damning.27 In this book, my engagement with Bradley and Cooper’s work is circumscribed by the name ‘Michael Field’, and so I will not be looking at the work of Arran and Isla Leigh. Although this early work merits investigation, it is not within my remit. It is only under the ‘Michael Field’ name that Bradley and Cooper began to write with authority and maturity, and, perhaps more importantly, the body of work composed under this name has an integrity granted by the self-conscious authorial construction that should not be ignored. Under the name ‘Michael Field’, Bradley and Cooper published twenty-eight dramas (mostly historical verse-dramas) during their lifetime, with an extra three religious plays appearing posthumously. There is evidence in the diaries of at least twenty-six further unpublished (and unfinished) dramas.28 Only A Question of Memory was actually staged (on 27 October 1893 at Jack Grein’s Independent Theatre in London), and it was not well received.29 It is the most performable of Michael Field’s plays, being set in the fairly recent historical past, and requiring a

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relatively small cast; most of the others are rather more grandiose in their gestures and infinitely less stageable. It was, nonetheless, Michael Field’s goal to get their plays performed. On 28 November 1891, for example, the women write in their diary of Arthur Symons: ‘It is horrible! Little Arthur has written a play accepted by the Independent Theatre. One may well hold one’s eyes waking – asking why, & how, & if one is failing – the air round us is chill. It is bitter & very dark’.30 Yet the plays were often received well as printed texts. Callirrhoe¨, the first published play, inspired great praise, and in 1893 Harper’s Bazar carried a laudatory review of the published drama to date by T. W. Higginson.31 Higginson begins by suggesting that Bradley and Cooper should hold the title of poet laureate, if that award were to be made ‘on the ground of pure strength of genius’. He goes on to compare the plays with those of Shakespeare, and it is clear that – on page, if not on stage – the drama was what made Michael Field’s reputation. Lionel Johnson, in his introduction to the selection of Michael Field’s poetry which appears in Alfred H. Miles’s The Poets and the Poetry of the Century anthology of 1898, also believes that, ‘It is upon her tragedies that Michael Field can most justly rest a claim to distinction’.32 Johnson goes on to sing magnificent praises of Michael Field, comparing their ‘imagination’, ‘ardour’ and ‘magnificence’ to, inevitably, those qualities in the work of Shakespeare.33 These accolades did not, however, stop Michael Field feeling that, after the initial enthusiastic reception of Callirrhoe¨, the plays were not as well received as they would have liked. Indeed, the obituary of Cooper in The Athenaeum states that, ‘After the discovery in the nineties that the work of two women had been taken for a man’s, the issue of their books was for many years passed over in silence. But, new voices coming to the front, ‘‘Wild Honey’’ (1908) was better received’.34 This critical celebration of the poetry in Wild Honey in 1908 is evidence of more than just the existence of a new generation of critics, less offended by the dual authorship. Although Bradley and Cooper originally saw themselves primarily as dramatists – and were caught up in the Victorian fervour for discovering a new Shakespeare – in the later years poetry seemed to become much more the dominant concern, and their prolific writing of verse was matched by its greater prominence in the diaries. Indeed, later in life ‘Michael Field’ would disown many of the plays. Bradley writes to John Gray (in an undated letter sometime between 1906 and 1914, but probably around 1908) of ‘the Borgia series’, stating ‘These are not by Michael Field’, and asking him to pass ‘from the last signed work – by Vale Press – Julia Domna (?) – to ‘‘Wild Honey’’ ’.35 Those

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disowned plays include not only Borgia, but also Queen Mariamne, The Accuser, and all the other 1911 plays: The Tragedy of Pardon, Tristan De Leonois, A Messiah, Dian: A Phantasy.36 This decision was no doubt motivated by issues of quality as well as worries about how the women’s new Catholic acquaintances might view those plays. After all, none of the poetry is ever renounced, even though they blush at its paganism after the conversion. The diaries, which give us so much information about the literary lives of Bradley and Cooper, demonstrate that ‘Michael Field’ was equally prolific in the arena of life-writing. In the twenty-nine volumes of Michael Field diaries, from 1888 to 1914, people, places and events are described with an insight and a cutting wit which makes them powerful documentary evidence of the age. It is this aspect of the diaries which comes to the fore particularly in T. and D. C. Sturge Moore’s edited selection from the volumes, published in 1933. Here D. G. Rossetti is reported as having a ‘constraining fascination’ which leaves his sister ‘striving to work out his redemption by prayer and denial’.37 An account of a meeting with Lionel Johnson ends with the stand-alone paragraph: ‘We looked down at Lionel’s feet; they were fabulous: tiny in girlish shoes and blue silk stockings’.38 Of Oscar Wilde we hear that ‘His body is too well tended and looks like a well-kept garden; his spirit, one would say, was only used to irrigate it’.39 Yet the diaries are much more than receptacles for the amusing anecdotes that give such a powerful flavour of the age to Sturge Moore’s edited volume. The diaries are well-written and carefully crafted literary works which have not received the attention they deserve as part of the Michael Field canon. It is Michael Field’s poetry that has been at the centre of the recent revival. Interest has focused particularly around the first three volumes of poetry published under the Michael Field name in the nineteenth century: Long Ago (1889), Sight and Song (1892) and Underneath the Bough (1893). Each volume has a strong rationale, with the first based around the Sapphic fragments, the second taking paintings as the inspiration for each poem, and the third taking The Ruba´iya´t of Omar Khayya´m to frame its sensuous lyrical project. Yet in this study I suggest that the volumes published in the twentieth century are just as, if not more, interesting: from the mysterious and, I will argue, central Wild Honey from Various Thyme (1908), to the later religious verse in Poems of Adoration (1912), Mystic Trees (1913) and Whym Chow (1914), these volumes develop the most profound of Michael Field’s concerns. Dedicated was published in 1914, but features poetry published mostly between 1899 and 1902 and so

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belongs to a rather earlier part of their career. The posthumously published selection of Michael Field’s unpublished poetry (mostly their later work) – entitled The Wattlefold and collected by Emily C. Fortey – appeared in 1930 and brings the total number of volumes to nine. There are unpublished poems to be found in draft form in the diaries, many of which have recently been published in Ivor C. Treby’s three-volume collection of Michael Field verse, In Leash to the Stranger.40 While the range and quantity of work by Michael Field is huge, this book will establish a necessary focus by concentrating primarily on Michael Field’s poetry, and is structured around analysis of the major poetic volumes listed above. The diaries and dramas (as well as an awareness of the importance of the dramatic mode to Bradley and Cooper’s poetry) will inform my analysis, but more as an introduction to Michael Field’s main concerns, and as a support to my reading of the poems. Chapter 1, in particular, is devoted to introducing the diaries, and establishing a critical framework for them, as well as providing an analysis of the play that most clearly sets out Bradley and Cooper’s artistic manifesto. While apparent in the diaries and plays (and in some sense more naturally arising within these genres), this agenda is often much more interestingly worked out in the poetry. It is in the working of the lyric that Michael Field’s authorial identity imposes the greatest problems and elicits the most ingenious solutions (the dual authorship raises quite different issues within dramatic writing, because collaboration is so much more common and much less problematic within the conventions of the genre). There are many reasons why Bradley and Cooper’s poetry, rather than their drama, has surfaced as Michael Field’s major legacy for today’s critic (not least our lack of understanding of the closet drama genre), but an appeal to the impressive quality of much of the lyric writing must form a part of the explanation. For my purposes, though, it is in key part the nature of the aesthetic questions posed in the lyric verse, and the fascination of those lyric experiments, that leads me to focus on the poetry, particularly, as having an important role to play in our understanding of fin-de-sie`cle aestheticism. Michael Field’s poetry received rather mixed reviews, which frequently made the women, always sensitive to criticism, feel rejected and embittered. In the diary of 1892, Bradley and Cooper vent their anger over Richard Le Gallienne’s review of Sight and Song which had just appeared in the Daily Chronicle. They are angry at his revealing the joint authorship and berating them on account of their female sex. Their worst fear is that ‘He has tried to spoil the graveness of criticism before our work & to give it a simper’.41

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11

Arthur Symons did not in general like their work very much but he did realise that, at their finest, the women created ‘something fierce, subtle, strange, singular’.42 This comment quite accurately identifies what it is about the poetry that has stood the test of time and has begun to be rediscovered by the critical community. The important exploration of ‘minor’ Victorian women poets, which has been under way, in earnest, since those first path-breaking anthologies were published around 1995, has unearthed some writers who have already begun to be accepted into a reformed poetic canon.43 Michael Field is clearly one of these figures, and has featured in every recent major anthology of Victorian poetry. We must not forget when thinking about this revival of interest in Bradley and Cooper’s work that some critics have long been championing their cause. R. K. R. Thornton and Ian Small published a facsimile reprint of both Sight and Song and Underneath the Bough in their book series ‘Decadents, Symbolists, Anti-Decadents: Poetry of the 1890s’,44 and occasional pieces on Michael Field have appeared over the course of the twentieth century – most notable, perhaps, is J. G. Paul Delaney’s work on Michael Field and Charles Ricketts.45 The more recent political motivation for a feminist, and possibly lesbian feminist, reclamation of Bradley and Cooper’s work has had mixed consequences for the study of Michael Field. On the one hand, it has highlighted, through some very impressive work, the complex gender politics inherent within the pseudonym, and, on the other hand, it has had a tendency to marginalise Bradley and Cooper from the mainstream of aestheticism (and their influential male mentors). Michael Field is usually examined in a way which situates Bradley and Cooper as part of a group of women poets, including Alice Meynell, Amy Levy, Rosamund Marriott Watson and others,46 yet this positioning does little to recognise the primary intellectual affinities Michael Field had with the likes of Walter Pater, John Gray and Charles Ricketts, or, for that matter, with Shakespeare, Donne or Carlyle. These literary connections with male writers (past and present), and the aesthetics they represent, are rarely given the prominence they deserve. The significance of the later poetry has also largely been ignored because of the interest in Michael Field as a pagan, Sapphic figure. The Catholic phase of Michael Field’s life is only just beginning to be properly appreciated. The focus on the eccentric cross-dressed, lesbian, incestuous identity of Michael Field risks leaving them where we – through our fascination with ‘otherness’ – have found them: the ‘odd couple’ on the horizon who embody our perversions du jour. This book will attempt to reconfigure Michael Field’s relationship with aestheticism in a way which allows us to see the women as more centrally,

12

Introduction

and interestingly, engaged with its main concerns, such as: the ekphrastic relationship between poetry and painting; the fin-de-sie`cle poem’s negotiation with lyric history; the definitive fin-de-sie`cle dynamic between the economic and the aesthetic; the connection between pagan and Catholic faiths at the end of the century; Victorian ideas of history; the relationship between Victorianism and modernism over the turn of the century; as well as, of course, sexology and sexual definition. This strategy, crucially, enables the book to refocus aestheticism in light of Michael Field, as well as to offer a new reading of Michael Field in light of recent debate about aestheticism. During the course of this book I will outline and engage with the most significant points of the existing debate around Michael Field. The early chapters, particularly, will address the popular questions of the pseudonym and the women’s sexuality, which are so fundamental to understanding their literary identity. Yet my aim in this book is to show how these aspects, which are so often connected with Michael Field’s ‘eccentricity’ and ‘marginality’ (and there is some truth in the claims that Bradley and Cooper are ahead of their time and looking forward to a world of performative identities), can also be seen as an intensification of some of the essential tenets of aestheticism and so place the women centrally within contemporaneous literary concerns. Michael Field’s relationships with their male mentor figures can be used to help trace their profound engagement with the key aesthetic questions of their age. If Bradley and Cooper are an odd couple, I would suggest it is because they embody to such an extreme the paradigms of aestheticism, not because they work outside of them. This claim for the interest and importance of Michael Field’s work to our understanding of aestheticism has to be supported by close analysis of their work, and this is my primary methodological tool. That the poems are so rewarding under detailed scrutiny is in itself a part of my argument for their value and aesthetic richness. There are inevitably aspects of Bradley and Cooper’s life and work that lie outside the remit of this book. I have already stated my intention to let the Michael Field persona dictate the parameters. While this decision allows me to concentrate on Bradley and Cooper’s best work in a manner coherent with their own self-construction, it does tend to exclude the more politically engaged, earlier, stages of their career. I do not want to claim that this aspect of their lives was insignificant, but, as Mary Sturgeon notes, the intense political activity they sought out during their days at Bristol University did not last long.47 Diana Maltz has argued convincingly for an alliance between aestheticism and socialism, and has

Introduction

13

explored eloquently the continuum between socialist aestheticism and Decadent indifference.48 The position Bradley and Cooper occupy on this spectrum shifts over the course of their lives and it is clear that there is a fairly rapid slide away from the early political commitment. Moreover, the two women show differing political commitment from the start, with Bradley being much more active, for various causes, than Cooper. The political engagement was not just the product of the women’s university life. Bradley was a companion of Ruskin’s Guild of St George, and it was under his influence, particularly, that the women were trained in socialist values. After the break with Ruskin, the women’s political commitment didn’t vanish, but it did diminish. In the early 1880s Bradley addressed a conference in The Hague, on the topic of prostitution, but this kind of activity is already more the exception than the norm.49 Bradley also joined the Fellowship of the New Life, but the diaries show a gradual lessening of interest in such matters.50 This transition is best shown through the role of the pet dogs who occupied such an important place in the women’s lives, and whose significance shifted through the years. Women writers, pet dogs, feminism and anti-vivisection sentiments have a strong attraction to each other in the nineteenth century,51 and when Bradley and Cooper first acquired that Skye terrier the dog was clearly symbolic of a certain kind of politics. Given Ruskin’s involvement with the anti-vivisection movement, it does seem rather ironic that Bradley and Cooper quarrelled with him because of their acquisition, and love, of their first dog.52 However, by coincidence, the women’s second major mentor figure, Robert Browning, was also heavily committed to the anti-vivisection cause. Yet, even when most closely aligned to these causes, Bradley and Cooper were not New Women. William Rothenstein stresses that, whatever the lifestyle of the women, ‘there was nothing of the blue-stocking in Michael Field’.53 Michael Field did feel the injustices committed against women by Victorian society, but after that first flurry of political conviction in their pre-Michael Field days, they dedicated themselves to art, and aesthetic considerations always came before political ones. Cooper, already less of a political animal than Bradley, writes in the 1892 journal that ‘I should never fight for any freedom that to gain [insert] wh. [end insert] would perturb my art. I have only so much energy – if the god demands it – the cause of womanhood must go hang!’54 In a letter dated 26 September 1907, Charles Ricketts teases Bradley about her past political commitment (and current lack of it), asking her how she might feel if ‘you were asked to address a Prevention-of-Cruelty-to-Animals Meeting with fervour and

14

Introduction

in your best past manner’.55 But the joy in the pet dog was to last, and gain other significances, after the anti-vivisection fervour died. The dog became an embodiment of their love for each other, their art and, eventually, within the women’s poetic system, their Christ. If the Skye terrier was symbolic of a socially engaged politics, the chow dog had become completely aestheticised, and enmeshed with that holy aestheticist trinity: love, art and religion. This book does not attempt to encompass the earlier (and altogether more socialist-sounding) Arran and Isla Leigh, nor the significance of the anti-vivisection movement, or other political affiliations, in the women’s lives. Where we do perhaps best see this political commitment surviving on into the work of Michael Field is in the dramas. These are more overtly political than the poetry, sometimes taking feminist themes (Brutus Ultor, The Tragic Mary, Stephania), historical-political themes (The World at Auction and the rest of the Roman trilogy), or concerns with power structures (The Father’s Tragedy). The dramas do have an interesting role to play in setting out the political and artistic manifesto of Michael Field, and it is often in this capacity that I will draw on them. While recognising that Bradley and Cooper’s political commitment waned after those early days, we still need to situate them more clearly within the continuum that Maltz gives us. Whilst certainly aesthetes at heart, they would never have been recognised as Decadents, and they can appear quite prudish (although their complex reaction is very ill served by this term) in the face of the more extreme manifestations of the style. Michael Field had submitted a poem for the second volume of the Yellow Book, but the women were so shocked by the nature of the first volume that they asked for it to be returned. On Wednesday 17 April 1894 they write in the diary about seeing a window display for the first volume: We have been almost blinded by the glare of hell. [ . . . .] As we came up to the shop we found the whole frontage a hot background of orange-colour to [?] [insert] sly [end insert], roistering heads, silhouetted against it & [insert] half[end insert] hiding behind masks. The window seemed to be gibbering, my eyes to be filled with incurable jaundice. [ . . . .] One felt as one does when now & then a wholly lost woman stands flaming on the pavement with the ghastly laugh of the ribald crowd in the air round her. One hates one’s eyes for seeing! But the infamous window mocked & mowed & fizgiged, saffron & pitchy, till one’s eyes were arrested like Virgil’s before the wind of flame. And the inside of the book! It is full of cleverness such as one expects to find in those who dwell below light & hope & love & aspiration. The best one can say

Introduction

15

of any tale or of any illustration is that it is clever – the worst one can say is that it is damnable. [ . . . .] Faugh! One must go to one’s Wordsworth & Shelley to be fumigated.56

This only reiterates an earlier prayer: ‘From decadence, Good Lord deliver us!’57 Yet this rejection was based on aesthetic and not political grounds. The politics of the Yellow Book were liberated and diverse, and included many pieces written by women.58 There were many writers, and sometimes rather conventional-seeming women such as Charlotte Mew, who embraced this opportunity, but there were at least equal numbers who didn’t.59 John Oliver Hobbes (Pearl Craigie) dismisses it as a ‘vulgar production’, Alice Meynell also refused in spite of invitations, and even Henry James, like Michael Field, regretted his association with the ‘horrid’ publication.60 Michael Field’s rejection of the Yellow Book was a rejection of the negative, sordid and brash aspects of the publication. Decadence presented the most intense manifestation of the poetics of absence and negativity that was characteristic of the Victorian lyric, and Michael Field’s assertion of desire and lyric presence is profoundly at odds with it, representing one of the most forceful challenges to it. Just as important, however, publishing within a context such as the Yellow Book would undermine the fine balance on which Michael Field’s poetry was based. Lyric poetry, more than prose, is altered by the context in which it is placed, and Bradley and Cooper did not want the multiplicity of their lyrics resolved, and destroyed, by the strong narrative and character of the Yellow Book. Michael Field’s poetic richness often depended, as I will show, precisely on not committing to any one readily available position. Aestheticism provides Michael Field with a language which refuses to commit; which can encompass, but hide, their earlier political commitments; and which can put art at the centre of their world. Talia Schaffer and Kathy Psomiades have both written extensively on the way women writers function within aestheticism, and how it gave them a language ‘complex enough to express their characteristically ambivalent, sophisticated, and intellectual views’.61 Bradley and Cooper were not New Women, or Decadents: their poetic strategy relied on not foregrounding politics in their work, and in using a language which simultaneously revealed and concealed. Even Bradley and Cooper’s use of the pseudonym is typical of the blurring of oppositions which offered such fruitful possibilities poetically.62 Of course, this ambivalence is itself a political strategy. It resists existing structures and allows new spaces to be inhabited.

16

Introduction

Jonathan Freedman recognises aestheticism as the moment when ‘the Romantic attempt to turn [ . . . ] from the emphasis on oppositions to the understanding of the potential reconcilability of such oppositions, is explicitly understood to be a necessary and inevitable failure’.63 For this reason, paradox (the apparent fusion of contradictory terms that are, nonetheless, still seen to be mutually exclusive) is the hallmark of this moment, and I will argue that Michael Field’s work can be best read through Bradley and Cooper’s manipulation and apparent reconciliation of conflicting concepts. Limits, bournes, meeting points have been important to the lyric throughout the nineteenth century because they signify an area of vision, epiphany and truth. But by the end of the century a particular kind of liminality becomes significant in the struggle with what was a selfconscious lyrical transition for many writers (and certainly for Michael Field). Arguably this is the point at which the horrors of the post-industrialised society were first recognised, but at which art still retains a Victorian confidence to (at least appear to) mend those rifts. Bradley and Cooper are particularly successful at developing textual strategies which afford them enabling double narratives. This liminal lyricism allows the encoding of two opposing terms simultaneously, and there is no doubt that the dual textual strategies owe their success at least in part to the duality of authorship which proved so fruitful a framework for Michael Field’s poetry. Paradox is the paradigm underlying Michael Field’s poetry: it is Michael Field’s main form of poetic engagement. But there is one paradox which is the key to Michael Field’s work and our understanding of it. This is the temporal paradox Pater (an aesthetic idol for Bradley and Cooper, who had a huge influence on their work) imaged in the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance through the ‘hard, gem-like flame’: the celebration of time as flux, which itself seeks to still the moment in its perfection.64 The irony embedded in this paradox is, of course, that the experience is so exquisite only because it is transitory; attempts to arrest it are bound to fail. This impossible desire to combine the diachronic with the synchronic is at the heart of Michael Field’s aesthetic, and achieving that combination, or the illusion of its achievement, is Bradley and Cooper’s greatest aesthetic triumph. This thesis frames my study. If the diachronic refers to chronological, linear, progression, the synchronic represents the possibility of a quasi-timeless moment at which different events, normally thought to exist in different times, can appear to co-exist. To combine the two is to achieve the impossible: the recognition of linear temporal structure, while simultaneously asserting the coincidence of events separated by that chronological movement.

Introduction

17

This book has a dual purpose. It is inevitably obliged to introduce Michael Field’s work and its main concerns. Yet, simultaneously, it has a particular thesis and follows a particular line of argument through the poetic work. The structure I describe below is designed to achieve both things. In Chapter 1 I set up Bradley and Cooper’s engagement with ideas of time and history through an analysis of the diaries and one key dramatic work. The diaries, so important to Michael Field’s conception of identity generally, help introduce Bradley and Cooper, but they also belong to a genre which is necessarily engaged with the idea of time and models of history, and which, in this instance, proves to be deeply aware of and alert to the possibilities inherent therein. This interest in time and history is finally refined and focused through my analysis of the one drama I look at in detail here. In the Name of Time shows how these concerns, so fundamental to life-writing, become important artistic preoccupations in the history plays. In the Name of Time acts as a manifesto for the specific dialectic of synchronic and diachronic which goes on to form the frame, or the spine, of my analysis of Michael Field’s poetry. Each subsequent chapter is organised around one volume (occasionally more) of Michael Field’s poetry, introduced in chronological order. Each chapter will suggest that the volume studied takes as its starting point a dialectic between terms that structures both aestheticism and the women’s own lives, and traces how it is crafted into a poetic paradox which enables the opposition to be transcended at the same time as its force is acknowledged: the two terms that are mutually exclusive (within the given context) can simultaneously be found within one another. The dialectics of life are thereby turned into art. This process is rooted within a quintessentially Victorian and, more precisely, Hegelian, process that draws meaning from recognising the self as founded upon contradiction (indeed, the importance of the third term, which I explore particularly in Chapter 6, is that which in Hegel’s terms enables the dialectic and prevents dyadic stalemate).65 While each chapter begins with a different constructed ‘paradox’ (again, these terms are often only in a paradoxical relationship with one another insofar as they are crafted thus within Michael Field’s poetics), they all end with the same temporal paradox, showing the manipulation of these concerns to be of vital significance to Michael Field’s poetic endeavour. Each chapter also brings clearly into focus one theme crucial to understanding Michael Field’s work more generally. This theme will be particularly relevant to the volume under discussion in that chapter. After introducing its focal volume (or volumes)

18

Introduction

of poetry, each chapter focuses closely on just a few poems which illustrate the particular theme and dialectic dealt with in that chapter. Chapter 2 is about Long Ago, which can be seen to revolve around the paradox of Sappho’s dual sexuality: her love for Phaon and her love for women. It is around the theme of sexuality (and the volume Long Ago) that most of the criticism on Michael Field has clustered, but here I add a new ‘fetishistic’ reading of Michael Field’s identity. However, this chapter also makes the transition from those more familiar debates around sexuality to the issues of time and history which concern me in my re-reading of Bradley and Cooper’s work. Chapter 3 moves on to Sight and Song, with its fundamental ekphrastic paradox (and the theme of the importance of the visual arts to Bradley and Cooper’s work), but again concludes with the importance of the temporal in this volume. After exploring the significance of the ancient poetic context invoked in Underneath the Bough, Chapter 4 discusses the volume’s concern with the paradoxical dual authorship of Michael Field (another theme common in existing criticism). Yet, ultimately, it finds these concerns played out within the temporal as well as the spatial arena. Although I will not deal with Dedicated in detail, it is touched on at the end of this chapter – where most of its verse belongs chronologically. Chapter 5 takes as its focus Wild Honey from Various Thyme, dealing thematically with the importance of the book as an aesthetic object within Michael Field’s oeuvre. There are two paradoxes fundamental to understanding this volume – one involving the simultaneously synchronic and diachronic structure of the book, and one created from the dialectic between economic and aesthetic imperatives in the book object – but all are managed through the bee discourse, which allows a set of contradictory significances to be held simultaneously there. ‘Various thyme/time’ is even more central to this project, I will argue, than it is to the other volumes. Chapter 6 deals with all three religious volumes as well as the volume dedicated to the chow dog, the death of whom was said to have precipitated the conversion. These volumes are treated in one chapter because they belong together and in some ways form a whole. The two main religious volumes (Poems of Adoration and Mystic Trees) were designed as two halves of one book. The Wattlefold (published in 1930) is a collection of their unpublished religious verse, displaying the work they decided not to include in the two major volumes. Whym Chow, Flame of Love belongs in this chapter chronologically, but it also forms a crucial part of the narrative I uncover in this part of my analysis. This chapter is devoted to Bradley and Cooper’s paradoxical, and highly inventive,

Introduction

19

reconciliation of the pagan and Catholic faiths that were, at this time, causing them to worry about the coherence of their personal life narrative. Central to this endeavour is the temporal reconciliation between past and present played out within the palimpsestic images of the poetry. If Chapter 1 sets these key concerns with time and history in relation to a nineteenth-century body of thought, then the final, concluding, chapter asks how far they might fit into a trajectory of early twentieth-century literature. The ‘eccentricity’ that has so fascinated us in our recent recuperation of Michael Field’s work has been used to identify the women almost exclusively with the Victorian. Yet Michael Field was, as Bradley and Cooper proclaimed, a truly turn-of-the-century figure, and their sophisticated manipulation of temporal tensions, particularly, enables me to show that they belong as much to the new century as to the old. Bradley and Cooper, within Michael Field, were perfectly placed to enact in the most concrete form the desire to ‘have it both ways’ that underpinned aestheticism. What have previously been seen as Michael Field’s idiosyncrasies (and sexual and textual perversions) can be reinterpreted as features which allowed the writers to enact aestheticist principles in a way which explored them critically. In other words, a fundamental premise for this study is that Michael Field became for Bradley and Cooper an artistic and intellectual construct. While the joint authorship and the use of the pseudonym may have started out as a joyous and natural expression of Bradley and Cooper’s unity – textually and emotionally – they very quickly began exploiting the poetic possibilities it offered. As well-read and educated women, Bradley and Cooper used Michael Field to enable them to interrogate the artistic and cultural climate in which they lived by creating a life and work shaped by its central tenets. I will read Michael Field as Bradley and Cooper’s study in aestheticism, and the lyrics, in key part, as metapoetry, concerned with asking what the aestheticist poem might be.

chapter 1

The diaries and dramas: life-writing and the temporal patterns of aestheticism

The concerns with patterns of time and history which form the backbone of this study might be thought more intrinsic to the genres of life-writing and historical drama than they are to lyric poetry. Certainly one can see, through an exploration of these themes within the diaries and plays as well as the poetry, a kind of intellectual unity in the writings of Michael Field. Moreover, the experiments in these other genres provide a crucial theoretical frame for reading the lyric poems. life-writing: the diaries as autobiographical narrative The life-writing of Michael Field has been studied very little; no doubt in part because of the daunting number of hand-written manuscript sources left to us in the archives. My aim is not to offer an overview of that material, but rather to analyse the mode and structures of self-creation and narration which are apparent in Bradley and Cooper’s diaries. What we find here are the same preoccupations which shape the literary work. In fact, I will be suggesting that we need to read the diary more as a crafted ‘work’ – as much worthy of literary attention as their poetry and plays – than as an intimate outpouring. That Bradley and Cooper write the diaries under the name ‘Michael Field’ foregrounds the artificiality inherent in the construction of any lifenarrative, and lays bare its methods. We can use the diaries as a way of examining the larger issues of historical narrative which obsessed Bradley and Cooper and which can be seen to inform the self-conscious creation of their own story. Michael Field’s life-narrative is, after all, split along some very dramatic fault-lines that seem the result of aesthetic imperatives more than a strict concern with depicting the reality of life’s vicissitudes. The early conversion to paganism is presented as mirrored by an equally cataclysmic conversion to Catholicism in 1907, even though faith itself 20

The diaries and dramas

21

was a constant in their lives and Bradley’s pagan years had been punctuated with occasional Christian epiphanies.1 Indeed, one of the mottos, quoting from Browning, written in at the start of the diary for 1901, is ‘For I intend to get to God’.2 Yet, in spite of signs of a gradual move back towards the Church (or, indeed, some indications that they never properly left it), the life story is presented in the diaries at key moments and through structuring symbols as having a dramatic tripartite structure in which the protagonists are involved in clear-cut moments of transition. Michael Field’s life story is based around a complex, and self-consciously crafted, personal mythology (as will become apparent particularly in later chapters), but there is a danger of only ever labelling Bradley and Cooper as eccentric, and seeing the madness of their personal symbolism, and never seeing their story as engaged fully with the major issues of the period. Rather, their lives display the tension that Linda H. Peterson outlines as fundamental to autobiography at the start of her Victorian Autobiography; that the challenge embedded in the genre itself was that writers were asked ‘to interpret within established conventions and yet produce fully individual lives’.3 This is demonstrated nowhere more clearly than in Michael Field’s conversion which, although motivated by the death of the dog, also coincided, roughly speaking, with the turn of the century, and the religious conversion of numerous other Decadent and aestheticist figures. I will suggest that the turn of the century itself was an event that had a profound effect on the life-narratives created by such educated literary people, and that it provided a shared organising principle. This tension between personal history and large-scale public narratives will underpin this exploration of Bradley and Cooper’s creation of the life of ‘Michael Field’. The diaries of Michael Field comprise twenty-eight, large, hard-bound, hand-written, volumes, covering the years 1888–1914.4 The ‘work’ is not, however, just made up of hand-written text, in two different hands. The volumes contain a mixture of textures: newspaper cuttings; rough and fair copy of poems; pressed flowers; copied-out letters from correspondents; transcriptions of letters they sent to others; and all manner of loose-leaf insertions. While the texture of the journals must have been richer before much of the loose-leaf material was taken out and placed in a separate folder,5 some of this still remains in the volumes. The diaries were given a title by the women: ‘Works and Days’. This title was added retrospectively to the first jointly written volume (1888), in red ink, squeezed in at the top of the first page. These are clear signs that Bradley and Cooper conceived of the diaries (not from the beginning, perhaps, but certainly

22

‘Michael Field’

from an early stage) as a ‘work’: a whole, public, narrative. Indeed, Bradley and Cooper discussed with Thomas Sturge Moore the possibility of his editing their diaries, which he eventually did, bringing out the, much abbreviated, single volume of Works and Days in 1933. The diaries of Michael Field are beyond any doubt what Lynn Z. Bloom terms ‘private diaries as public documents’, fulfilling all her criteria for selfconscious works of art.6 The over-determined public nature of Michael Field’s diary raises questions about the relationship between the journal and full-blown autobiography, which might illuminate the nature of the diaries and the construction of ‘Michael Field’. When Robert A. Fothergill laments the conventional nature of many Victorian diaries, he misses ‘the autobiographical energy and individual accent that would make them remarkable’.7 Above all, it is this ‘autobiographical energy’ and artistry which makes Bradley and Cooper’s diaries worthy of study. Laura Marcus has made a case for diaries, letters and journals playing a particularly important role in women’s autobiography, and the letters and diaries of Michael Field do fulfil what Marcus lays down as one of the basic criteria of autobiography: the intention to ‘understand the self and to explain that self to others’.8 This intention is witnessed in Michael Field’s case through the struggle to narrate the life, rather than simply record it. Simultaneously, however, the problems for considering Michael Field’s life-narrative as autobiographical are made abundantly clear in Lejeune’s definition of autobiography as a ‘Retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality’.9 Lejeune’s work immediately raises two very significant questions in relation to Michael Field’s life-writing. The first is the issue of the pseudonym, and the second (which will lead me to the main theme of this chapter) is the importance of retrospection to the narration of a life story. I will return in more detail in Chapter 2 to existing criticism on the operation of the literary pseudonym. The assumed name has a rather different effect in the context of the life-writing; here the women’s selfcreation through this pseudonym expresses their unity, but it does not efface their distinctness. Bradley and Cooper write in their different hands in the diary, and often give two different versions of one event. However, in spite of the fact that ‘Michael Field’, as the subject of the journal, is clearly not a fictional persona as such, the importance Lejeune places on the proper name as the guarantee of ‘a contract of identity’ risks placing Michael Field’s life-writing outside of his definition of the autobiographical

The diaries and dramas

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dialectic.10 Laura Marcus comments that, ‘From the point of view of the writer, an autobiography cannot fail, unless [ . . . ] it is about the wrong person altogether’.11 Bradley and Cooper’s life-writing appears to come dangerously close to doing just this. Yet in their dual authorship Bradley and Cooper might be seen to enact symbolically the problem of the single self which is often defined as a multiplicity of personas tied to one proper name. Bradley and Cooper, by using the one pseudonym in the diaries, can be seen to resolve what Marcus calls ‘the Scylla and Charybdis of identity, ‘‘impossible unity’’ or ‘‘intolerable division’’ ’.12 After all, depending on your perspective, autobiography can either be the finest example of the unity of subject and object or an embodiment of the inevitable split between subject and object.13 Fothergill sees diaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as viewing selfhood ‘in terms of singleness and multiplicity, identity being realizable either as the one authentic role among two or more contestants, or as a complex unity of dual or multiple aspects’.14 It is just this kind of concern that is dramatised in the Michael Field signature, under which events (in the diaries) are often narrated twice – the second headed, for example, ‘My Version’.15 Far from disqualifying the Michael Field diaries from being considered as autobiography, the pseudonym allows this text to comment self-consciously on questions about the artificiality, or constructedness, of all life-narratives. The Michael Field signature complicates, questions and expresses (and perhaps even offers solutions to) some of the key issues of identity within life-writing. There is a very real sense in which the Michael Field persona is an interpretative framework within the diaries: it mediates or expresses the women’s experience of the world as distinguished from the unmediated raw reality of Bradley and Cooper, and allows them to communicate this to others.16 As a framework for interpretation, the use of the persona creates some distance between their own lived experience and their presentation of that experience. Opening up this space makes it possible for the diary to become a work that is more reflective and crafted, and more like an autobiography (as opposed to the commonplace diary), but it also allows Bradley and Cooper to self-consciously pose within their diary some of the key questions of that autobiographical art. Yet Lejeune’s definition of autobiography was concerned, remember, not only with who writes, but also when that narrative is written. When Lejeune defined autobiography as a ‘retrospective’ narrative, he is gesturing towards all of those features which separate the constructed narrative – the ‘literary’ work – from the diurnal jotting. Linda Peterson

24

‘Michael Field’

sees the spiritual diaries and memoirs of Victorian women as typically ‘discontinuous presentations of their lives, only occasionally retrospective and rarely coherent in self-analysis’.17 In other words they lack the qualities of interpretation, retrospection and narrative which characterise true autobiography. The autobiographical requirement of retrospection seems something of a problem for the diary, yet an autobiography is rarely written at the moment when retrospect over the whole life is possible, and diaries are rarely written simultaneously with the events they describe. To a certain extent the distinction built around retrospection is a false one. Even the daily diarist writes in retrospect about the events of one day, if not more, and this allows the element of craft to encroach. This is clearly seen in an episode from the Michael Field diary that, although depicting an incident that led to some kind of nervous collapse on Cooper’s part, is retrospectively narrated by her to real literary effect. This is the tale of Bradley and Cooper’s meeting with Berenson in an art gallery, in which a very complex and fraught emotional drama is played out amongst the three of them, underneath the Renaissance masterpieces.18 Bradley unleashes disaster when she makes an unfortunate casual reference to a letter she received from Mary Costello (later Berenson) which described an arrangement to live ‘a` trois’ with Bernhard and her lover Hermann Obrist.19 Bernhard is enraged and speaks of his agony and revulsion at the very idea of it. The three of them are ‘completely overtaken’ but manage to get to one of the gallery benches and end up in a line in front of a Bellini Pieta`. While Berenson rages to Bradley about Mary, Cooper finds she can do nothing but listen – a difficult fate for one so enamoured of Berenson: ‘I, if any one, must be an outsider at this moment when his first passion totters before my eyes’. Yet, throughout this episode pathetic fallacy is employed by Cooper to great effect as she fixes her eyes steadfastly on the painting of the suffering Christ in order to keep a better grip on her own trauma, only to lean forward and see Berenson’s face ‘almost as gray [sic] as the dead Christ’s, & the eyes, once mirrors of the loveliness & joy of the world, now appealing for justice, & of such diminished light!’20 Although clearly written after the event, Cooper’s narration combines the white-hot passion of the moment with a distanced and sometimes almost droll narratorial voice which uses literary devices to tell her tale to best effect. Throughout this episode verbs in the past tense have been crossed out and changed to the present in order to keep up the pace and tension, and dialogue is on occasion quoted directly to reinforce the dramatic intensity. This incident marries the immediacy of diary writing

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with the narrative craft and control of autobiography. Fothergill gives us the term ‘serial autobiography’ to denote those diaries, of ‘a particular and well-developed type’, which by virtue of their form and narrative can be considered a combination of the two types. In such works the diarist feels under obligation to: prosecute actively the task of bringing along a coherent story with significant interest. Instead of an ad hoc jotting down of impressions, the writing of the diary entails a continual negotiation between comprehensiveness and digested relevance.21

This seems the right way to talk about the Michael Field diary, where Bradley and Cooper use the frameworks of autobiography, and its narrative techniques. Another example will soon show that the Michael Field diary entries were, particularly if covering a significant event, often written retrospectively, looking back over a few days. This allowed for reflection, interpretation and a developed sense of narration. Whym Chow, Bradley’s beloved dog, sickened and died over the course of a week in January 1906. The story really begins on Sunday 21 January.22 Cooper writes the first entry for this day, noting that she is in bed with ‘Michael’ reading to her: ‘Chow hardly comes up at all’ (9v–10r). The entry for the next day continues in Cooper’s hand: on Monday 22nd, ‘Vet came [ . . . ] But he notices the dog is not yet better. He will call on Wednesday’ (10r). The next entry is for Wednesday 24 January, still in Cooper’s hand, where she records Bradley’s preparations for her visit to London to meet Ricketts (at his house, ‘the Palace’) and be introduced to John Gray: ‘I have to press her to go because the vet has not been: but she so needs change and I do not feel in any dread. As she leaves, Chow makes an effort with straight fore-paws to hold up to the window’ (10v). The significance of that Wednesday is made clear by the fact that the next set of entries, this time by Bradley, circle back over this period, covering much of the same period as Cooper has just done, but going over it from a different perspective. Bradley’s retrospective begins in earnest, however, on the Wednesday – the date at which Cooper left off her narrative: ‘What an entry I have now to make! On Wednesday [ . . . ]’ (14r). She goes on to describe her visit to John Gray and the bad news that awaited her on her return. Her entry for Friday records the words of a specialist who saw the Chow dog the previous day: ‘ ‘‘I am sorry, it is a bad case – I cannot say he will recover’’ – Yet if Chow were his dog, he would ‘‘give him a month’’ – there is chance, though it is vague chance, for life’ (14v).

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‘Michael Field’ Next, Cooper takes over the story in an entry for Sunday 28th (14v):

how terrible Sundays are! Milestones of doom to us as a family. Today I have had the worst loss of my life – yes worse than that of beloved mother or the tragic father . . . My Whym Chow, my little Chow-Chow, my Flame of Love is dead & has died – O cruel God! – by our will!

Now Cooper returns to that same pivotal Wednesday and she too tells the story retrospectively from that date: ‘Wednesday after Michael started for the Palace [ . . . ]’ (14v). This third telling of the events of Wednesday 24th begins pretty much where Cooper had left off in her initial narrative, so the two halves of her narrative sandwich Bradley’s between them. From the fateful Wednesday, Cooper covers the story of the illness and death of the dog in a long retrospective tale, including the scene of Bradley putting the dog to sleep on the Sunday: ‘I hear the vet & Michael go down. I bow in prayer. [ . . . .] My Love returns white. She has had to hold her adored while the sleeping draught was given’ (17v). The narration of this particularly significant moment in Bradley and Cooper’s lives constitutes a pronounced version of a dramatisation which goes on more generally throughout the diaries. The drama of this episode is partly a product of the involved narrative structure they use, deploying cliffhangers and repeated retellings of the same day from different perspectives to create a sense of almost cinematic narrative structure. As Fothergill says of the practice of the serial autobiographer, ‘Unlike autobiography, which may tell in retrospect the history of self-development and the resolution of internal conflicts, the diary receives the actual form and pressure of these processes’.23 Yet the drama of this episode does not end with these retellings of the fateful day. Cooper’s last vivid diary depiction leads straight into a transcript of her letter to Marie Sturge Moore, which tells the story of the last few days yet again, but this time with a wider context of reflection and interpretation (fol. 20r): I write to Marie Sturge Moore. My dear Marie, You have understood. That we should have lost Chow is, as you say, ‘awful news’. Poor Michael after four days of nightmare nursing & 6 hours of bungled efforts to put our most loved to rest has broken down completely & is suffering dreadfully in nerves & head . . . So I am[,] only less smitten.

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Marie, those who really knew us understood that in this bare world we went to him as our brazier of love, the flames & the incense, the motion & thrill we found perfect alone in the passion Chow had for Michael – a love that has consumed his life in 8 years, when he should have lived 8 years more. The boy who for seven years has served us writes ‘He was your only & dearest friend you had at Paragon.’ & our landlord here said simply when we spoke of our grief ‘why, of course, he was your all.’

This transcript provides a further layer to the retrospective narrative of those few crucial days, and a new perspective. It is in some ways a much more developed narrative than that recorded previously in the diary. The description of Bradley’s stressful involvement in the dog’s death given to Marie Sturge Moore is more harrowing in its detail than the terse, although painful, earlier report in the diary by Cooper. More importantly, the letters transcribed in the diary bring a wider world into the diary – introducing the voices of other characters, and a dramatic texture. Not only does this letter bring in Marie Sturge Moore herself, as an audience to witness the events of the past few days, but it also features characters from Bradley and Cooper’s lives who add a further layer to the drama. The servant boy and the landlord people this narrative as ‘extras’ who act as an internal audience for Bradley and Cooper’s drama, linking the diaries of Michael Field with a public world. A little further on in the diary, Bradley and Cooper express anger at a letter from Charles Ricketts which made fun of what he saw as their excessive grief (25v–26r). We then see a transcript of their reply explaining the history of their love for the Chow: You ask how many dogs had I loved – well, Painter, only one before Whymmie – a little Skye, who was with me 15 years. And I never had another in his place. [ . . . ] I gave Henry and Amy each their dog – & they found such joy of Rye & Music that they gave me Chow to be my very own, to be mine forever. (25v)

Another voice has now been added to the dramatisation of this incident. We’ve heard, so far, the reactions of Marie Sturge Moore, the servant boy, the landlord and Ricketts; but it is the implied voice of Ricketts – heard through Bradley’s response to his letter – that adds a significantly new dimension. By including his jarring voice, Bradley and Cooper are forced into further acts of reflection and self-interpretation, and they are given the opportunity to justify themselves not just to Ricketts but also to a broader possible audience of the diary. This episode demonstrates a crafting of narrative which can only result from something of the autobiographical prerogative for retrospection

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(even of only a few days) and interpretation. It is the final irony that the motto for this 1906 volume of the diary (prominently placed on the first page) reads: ‘Sois pieux devant le jour que se le`ve. Ne pense pas a` ce qui sera dans un ans, dans dix ans. Pense a` aujord’hui. Laise les the´ories. Toutes les the´ories, vois-tu, meˆme celle de vertu, sont mauvaises, sont sottes, fait le mal. Ne violente pas la vie . . . Sois pieux envers chaque jour, aimez-le, respecte-le, ne le fle´tris pas surtout, ne l’empeˆche pas de fleurir. Aimez-le, meˆme quand il est gris et triste, comme aujourd’hui [sic].’24 ‘Jean-Christophe’ L’adolescent par Romain Rolland25

This demand to live each day at a time and not theorise life comes, ironically, at the start of a year which would see Michael Field’s diary begin to formulate their lives in terms of the grandest theories in order to reconcile past, present and future into a satisfying whole. Indeed, the dog’s death is presented as the motivation for Bradley and Cooper’s conversion to Catholicism, and thus ushered in a new and decisive grand narrative. A few years later Bradley writes a letter to John Gray, covering exactly the same incident described in these diary entries, but from yet another point of view: her own thoughts during her trip to meet Gray on that fateful day (‘that day I met you at the Palace [ . . . ] I went home to learn my chow was already in frenzy’).26 Bradley, still narrating those same events, can by this stage move one step further in her interpretation of them, and she now ties them in with her subsequent religious conversion, glossing them in such a way that they are seen as part of a coherent progression towards it. historical patterning in the life of ‘michael field’ To shift attention from details of the texture of the diary to the work as a whole, it is necessary to consider the larger-scale narrative implications of that turn to the Church, which so clearly brings with it a new interpretation of the life. The serial biography of Michael Field becomes, towards its end, one structured by the conventions of spiritual autobiography – that dominant autobiographical structure which Linda Peterson argues proved so difficult for the nineteenth-century female writer to adopt.27 This genre of personal account was structured around a tale of youthful depravity, conviction of sin and dramatic conversion. The

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conversion crisis – spiritual or secular – is crucial to the autobiographical narrative because it provides a moment which fixes the meaning and structure of the life-narrative, and provides an overwhelming authority around which everything else must fall into place.28 Yet one might think this a particularly difficult structure to use in the serial life-narrative. It is undoubtedly true that Michael Field’s letters to John Gray, written between 1906 and the end of their lives, as well as their journal entries of the same period, are the most straightforwardly autobiographical pieces precisely because they are written at a point when Bradley and Cooper are able to discern distinct patterns within their lives, and to reinterpret their past. This reflective stance is strongly apparent in statements such as the following: My terror is to deny Him in my past years. I have received Him in communion – He has sought me from a child – and again & again I have forsaken Him, & broken away on the great wave of ‘modernism’29 that swept over us in the eighties – sometimes deliberately I have turned my lamp upside down to be sure not a drop of oil was left in it – & lo – mysteriously it has been fed for me again – and this is my praise. And this keeps me weeping for joy. [ . . . .] how ignorant I have been. I knew no more – heeded no more [ . . . ].30

This moment at which Bradley and Cooper apparently have to reconfigure their past is something examined in greater detail in my final chapter, and to an extent in Chapter 5 also. But in these later chapters I will in fact be arguing, mainly from textual evidence, that the women don’t simply rewrite their past. Instead they find in that past, in all the existing detail in the diaries, material which they can use to trace a pattern which seems to have already existed, and which neatly accommodates this new religious conviction. In other words, it would be very wrong to assume that the diary had no narrative shape until this moment of conversion – and that a new shape was forced upon the material at this time.31 What we see in the conversion is a moment of realisation that their life-narrative already looks like a spiritual autobiography, rather than a rewriting of the past. It is not that Bradley and Cooper set out initially to write a spiritual autobiography, but such textual models were so deeply engrained that they undoubtedly affected the patterns that were laid down in the diaries long before the conversion. Moreover, the diary itself, as a developing map for identity, will affect future actions and perceptions in the real world. As Fothergill puts it: the author becomes aware of the ‘patterns and processes at work’

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in their life, and ‘Channelled back into the diary, this awareness becomes the source of structural ‘‘themes’’ that may give to the work a highly sophisticated design’.32 Large-scale shapes and structures grew in the diaries as the text grew, and they played the invaluable role of patterning and enabling wider reflection on the messy everyday lives of the two women. The model of the spiritual autobiography may be the most apparent structure in the life-writing of Michael Field, but we can see other narrative principles – taken from more general, and large-scale, models of history – also employed to make sense of contingent and ongoing experience. (It is the more fundamental, and probably subconscious, patterning in accordance with these principles that enables the more specific structure of the spiritual autobiography to supervene.) Although Bradley and Cooper initially have no sense of a complete structure into which to place their lives, we can see them representing the present moment in light of structures familiar to them from narratives of western history. After all, the broad tensions of the life of Michael Field – pulled, in phases, between Christian and pagan forces, as well as ancient and modern – are hardly unusual in Victorian life-narratives. Ruskin may be the obvious precedent for Bradley and Cooper, but there are many others.33 This life-structuring dialectic is certainly a product of the era in which they lived, and Bradley and Cooper’s high level of education meant that Michael Field’s life-narrative (like Ruskin’s and Arnold’s) was inevitably going to be influenced by expectations shaped by Victorian intellectual culture. The nineteenth century, it is commonly asserted by historians, saw itself as an age of transition. In 1887, Tennyson informed his son, ‘You must not be surprised at anything that comes to pass in the next fifty years. All ages are ages of transition, but this is an awful moment of transition [ . . . .] The truth is that the wave advances and recedes’.34 The Victorians’ consciousness of their own separateness from the past – their own modernity – makes up what many historians have told us was a new preoccupation with history and a faith in its structure and purpose.35 Historians also tell us that the nineteenth century was the first to have a number; to self-consciously think of itself as a block of a hundred years which had a beginning and an end. The idea of a century as a category not just for historical thinking, but for the location of oneself in the present gained momentum, according to Chris Brooks, in the second half of the eighteenth century, and became a definitive characteristic of the next.36 Such unprecedented historical self-reflexivity ensured that the

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lead-up to the end of the century was going to be a particularly traumatic time of painful transition, of beginning and ending. Such epoch-defining large-scale theories of history may initially seem to have little to do with the serial autobiography of Michael Field – and, certainly, the personal narratives of women poets are not usually situated in such contexts. Yet such a connection has to be made in order to understand the dramatic structure of Michael Field’s life. Carlyle’s influential philosophy of history, formulated prior to his encountering the Saint-Simonians, was based on the analogy between the life of the world and the life of the individual, and involved three phases: Imagination, Understanding and Reason.37 The first period was the period of the Minnesingers in the twelfth century, the second a period of enquiry or didacticism which continued through various fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury authors, and the third grand phase was a period of new spirituality and belief in the midst of doubt and denial. The stages of Michael Field’s life show a vague, but intriguing, similarity with this pattern. Bradley published her first volume of lyrics in 1875, under the title The New Minnesinger, and this volume represented the first, apprentice, phase of her poetry. Phase two, the period of enquiry and understanding, is analogous to the main part of Bradley and Cooper’s life together, during which they celebrated their pagan faith and pursued their education in the classics. The final phase of Michael Field’s life was undoubtedly their religious one following their conversion to Catholicism. It wasn’t only Carlyle who envisaged history as moving in recurring cycles. If Vico was one of the more profound models, Thomas Arnold can be seen to take Viconian ideas into the nineteenth century, and Matthew Arnold absorbed much of his father’s thinking. Michael Field’s passion for Sappho and Greek tragedy undoubtedly owes something to Matthew Arnold’s mid-century endorsement of imitation of the ancients. Bradley and Cooper, as much as Arnold, believed in recurring cycles of time which linked the present with certain eras in the past.38 Carlyle’s ideas, however, seem particularly relevant to Bradley and Cooper’s conception of Michael Field’s story. In the Lectures on the History of Literature he gave in 1838, he identified two great eras of belief: the polytheism of the Greeks and Romans, and the Christianity of the Middle Ages. Each age, he argues, is followed by a period of transitional unbelief.39 Michael Field’s own transition from pagan polytheism, through the dark days of despair when the chow dog died, to Catholicism, mirrors closely this grand theory of the stages of western history. Carlyle, of course, believed his age to be one of transition. While Michael Field’s serial autobiography

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represented a microcosmic version of these cycles of belief and periods of transition, it is notable that their most pronounced period of darkness and unbelief coincided, more or less, with the turn of the century, thus linking their life-cycle with much bigger patterns of history. The diaries enable the construction of the life-narrative of Michael Field in a way which crafts Bradley and Cooper’s own life narrative into something much more aesthetically satisfying, and which links their own life events with much bigger temporal patterns and paradigms. This is no innocent record of their daily events. In addition to this large-scale dialectic of belief and unbelief, specific images used by Carlyle seem to be echoed closely in Bradley and Cooper’s articulation of their own past. In his elaboration of a tree metaphor borrowed from Norse mythology, for example, Carlyle produces a specifically textual image: Let us search more and more into the Past; let all men explore it, as the true fountain of knowledge; by whose light alone, consciously or unconsciously employed, can the Present and the Future be interpreted or guessed at. For though the whole meaning lies far beyond our ken; yet in that complex Manuscript, covered over with formless inextricably-entangled unknown characters, – nay, which is a Palimpsest, and had once prophetic writing, still dimly legible there, – some letters, some words, may be deciphered [ . . . ].40

It is in exactly these terms that Bradley and Cooper articulate their relationship with their own past as Michael Field. In the poem called ‘Palimpsest’, published in Wild Honey (the volume which mediates between their pagan existence and their new Catholic lives), the women explicitly describe their Catholic belief as the text written over the old pagan faith. The older text can still be glimpsed through the new, telling the tale of the ‘old great days’. Similarly, Carlyle’s image of the ‘WorldPhoenix’ also finds an answering call in the work of Michael Field. For Carlyle this image illustrates how ‘Creation and Destruction proceed together; ever as the ashes of the Old are blown about, do organic filaments of the New mysteriously spin themselves’.41 More than a shadow of this theory is to be found in Michael Field’s poem ‘Renewal’ (again published in Wild Honey) which marks the transition between pagan and Christian, and which images the narrator as phoenix: So joyously I lift myself above The life I buried in hot flames to-day; The flames themselves are dead: and I can range

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Alone through the untarnished sky I love, And I trust myself, as from the grave I may, To the enchanting miracles of change. (120)

This analogy between Michael Field’s life story and Carlyle’s patterns of history can be continued, possibly at the risk of stretching credulity, if we examine Carlyle’s agent of the revolution needed to move between periods of unbelief and belief. The Hero, the Great Man, with his ‘flowing lightfountain’ of ‘native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness,’ who ‘enlightens’ the ‘darkness of the world’ causes this historical movement.42 Is it entirely coincidental that Bradley and Cooper were brought to Catholicism by the death of their chow dog, who symbolised for them a ‘flame of love’? Carlyle’s Hero is, after all, what Peter Allan Dale describes as ‘an unself-conscious, indeed, to a degree an anti-intellectual conveyor of the Idea’.43 The terms of Bradley and Cooper’s own personal transition from pagan to Christian are at once personal, yet simultaneously connected with an influential discourse which articulated global history through the nineteenth century. This connection should not be surprising. Most educated late Victorians had read the big histories of Macaulay, Carlyle and others.44 Even Carlyle’s early works were back in the limelight towards the end of the century as his death in 1881 spawned prominent obituaries and retrospectives. By the time J. A. Froude’s Life of Carlyle appeared in 1885, Carlyle was acknowledged as a formative influence on Victorian identity. Sartor Resartus, in particular, was considered Carlyle’s most influential work by the end of the century because it had become particularly relevant to the spiritual crisis of the Victorian age. Moreover, in Sartor Resartus Carlyle presents a very particular model for both writing a life story and for linking personal history to global ideas of history. Here the editor of Teufelsdro¨ckh’s life arranges the autobiographical fragments in line with conventional patterns of spiritual autobiography. This comment on the lack of structure inherent in the random events of an individual life, and the need for an organising narrative to be imposed, is a lesson Bradley and Cooper learned well. It is this importance of the forms one creates for history, and one’s responsibility for creating those forms, that is the crux of Carlyle’s Clothes Philosophy in Sartor. He is concerned with man’s capacity to make symbols and the way these symbols exist in continuous cycles through time. It is, likewise, Bradley and Cooper’s capacity to create signs and structures to make sense of their lives that is perhaps the most striking part of their biography. The

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ingenious systems of symbol and metaphor they use to make a coherent narrative of their lives will be discussed in the context of their poetry later in this book. Bradley and Cooper wove the ultimate ‘suit’ in the life of Michael Field.45 What we see by reading the diaries alongside Sartor Resartus is that the dual persona, the personal symbolism, the conventional cycles of history which they draw on to express Michael Field’s narrative, are all inseparable from the reality of their lives. These conventional or fictional structures allow for the expression, not of the facts, but of the interpretation of the facts of their lives. Yet it is one thing for Teufelsdro¨ckh’s editor to reconstruct his life in accordance with various patterns, and quite another to integrate these structures across the course of a journal narrative. More needs to be said about how Bradley and Cooper managed to structure their own serial lifenarrative with such historical models. The contemporary German historian and philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) believed that ‘The power and breadth of our own lives and the energy with which we reflect on them are the foundations of historical vision’.46 The influence he posits is mutual, however, as autobiographers conceive of themselves in a way which is historically determined, as well as influencing our conception of history. This symbiotic relationship between self and its historical world is inevitable because for Dilthey historical forms are not just containers which shape and order the life-narrative; they actually structure the subject’s perception of their life.47 The abolition of the distinction between how a life is lived and how it is written also weakens the distinction between diurnal narratives and autobiographical ones. For Bradley and Cooper, certainly, the structures of their life-narrative are structures of perception much more than structures of retrospective narration, and, as such, are narratives present throughout their diaries. Writing of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, Dilthey states: a man looks at his own existence from the standpoint of universal history [ . . . .] he experiences the present as always filled and determined by the past and stretching towards the shaping of the future; thus he feels it to be a development [ . . . .] The significance of an individual existence is unique [ . . . ] yet, in its way, like one of Leibniz’ monads, it reflects the historical universe.48

Here Dilthey identifies the present as the autobiographical moment, which is ‘determined by the past and stretching towards the shaping of the future’. This is no privileged position at the end of the life, but a vantage point which is inevitably in flux between past and future. In fact, as Laura Marcus points out, Dilthey’s desire to define autobiography as

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‘the understanding of oneself’ makes no reference to the possible forms of autobiography, and so effaces the distinction between journal and autobiographical forms.49 In Dilthey’s frame of reference Bradley and Cooper’s life-narrative does appear to be autobiographical, but crafted through a heightened awareness of the present moment in relation to the past and future, rather than through the imposition of a retrospective frame. Laura Marcus writes of the ‘hypothesis’ – ‘the trying on or out of models’ – as a more useful way of thinking about autobiographical identity than ‘fictionality’.50 Carlylean models of history (and of the relationship between the individual life-narrative and larger-scale patterns of history) formed an important part of the women’s immediate intellectual environment, and influenced Bradley and Cooper’s own ‘hypothesis’.51 Of course, it wasn’t only Carlyle who brought these ideas into late nineteenth-century culture, and my claim is not for the overwhelming importance of one influence, but rather the significance of a particular strand in contemporary thinking to understanding what Bradley and Cooper were doing. Pater, most notably of Michael Field’s contemporaries, was developing this interest in recurring patterns of history at the fin de sie`cle, as I will soon show. The life-writing of Michael Field is well crafted, with a developed sense of narrative structure: it should clearly be treated as a ‘work’ of Michael Field. It is not that this diary shows a level of craftsmanship previously unseen; the diary of Frances Burney, for example, also shows a remarkable self-awareness in its use of literary models and devices. But what is particularly striking about Michael Field’s life-writing is its intense engagement with history and contemporary models for thinking about history. There is no doubt that writing the diaries jointly under the name ‘Michael Field’ opened up a space for self-reflexivity and self-creation that made this possible in a sustained manner. In the Name of Time As demonstrated, the diaries have a very dramatic quality to them, and are in some places literally a dramatisation of the lives of the two women. But, equally, the interest in history characteristic of the life-writing is just as clearly a primary concern of the dramas – all of which are ‘historical’ works in that they are set in relation to particular events or past ages. Yet the plays are also historical in a more fundamental way: they have as a central concern the human relationship with time. This is worked out in

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various different ways, more or less successfully, throughout the dramatic oeuvre; for example, Attila, My Attila! declared itself, in the introduction, to be a play about the New Woman, yet set in the fifth century – and reviewers are intrigued by this ‘attempt to look at the fifth and nineteenth centuries at the same moment’.52 Yet one play, above all others, seems to be devoted to Michael Field’s historical vision, and to setting out something of a manifesto for the authors’ most fundamental concerns: In the Name of Time displays a passionate concern with time and history through which we can read all the women’s work – dramatic, autobiographical and poetic. As Mary Sturgeon wrote in her 1920 biography, the essential philosophy behind Michael Field’s work was ‘a philosophy of change serving a religion of life’.53 While my study will examine many themes and issues in this rich and varied oeuvre, it will be framed by, and keep returning to, this fundamental driving force. In the Name of Time, although not published until after the women’s deaths in 1919, was written between 1889 and 1895. This long period of composition, and the references to it in the diary throughout this period,54 show how fundamental its themes were to the women’s thoughts during this formative part of Michael Field’s career. It concerns the fortunes of Carloman, the son of Charles Martel, although that historical specificity is not important for long, as timeless issues about the structure of history come to the fore. Carloman’s quixotic quest for the meaning of life takes him through several incarnations, and his journey is mirrored by that of his wife, left behind under his brother’s rule. Over the course of the play the pair mutate from king and queen, to ‘monk and harlot’. There is a kind of Shakespearean misrule underlying this play, but it is best analysed in Nietzschean or Paterian terms. What we see enacted in the play is the conflicting pull of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or the centripetal and the centrifugal. Pater begins writing about these opposing forces before he read Nietzsche, but there is no doubt that the English tradition also absorbed a great deal, from the 1890s onwards, from the German philosophers, and it is in ‘The Marbles of Aegina’ that Pater most clearly expounds his theory of centrifugal and centripetal forces.55 Bradley and Cooper encountered these ideas primarily through Pater, writing in a draft letter to him (although struck out and presumably not appearing in the final version) that ‘The historical method that inspires your work, is a [ . . . ] vital theory’.56 They also unwittingly came into contact with Nietzsche through discussion with Bernhard Berenson, although they did not realise this until they read him themselves in 1895, just as they had finished writing In the Name of Time. (At this point

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the women felt Nietzsche expressed everything they had been trying to say, and they were furious with Berenson for not having owned up earlier to the source of the ideas he had been presenting to them.)57 Pretty much from the start King Carloman is rejecting the centrifugal dynamic of his current position and dreaming of a more peaceful and introverted life: ‘No more / Will I be petty marshal to a crew / That hack and murder’, ‘There is a glorious Betterness at work / Amid the highways and the solitudes; / I would be with it’ (p. 1). Along with the messy, energised life of the head of state, he also wants to renounce his wife: she too is associated with the transient he wants to relinquish in search of the centripetal and static ideal: ’Tis vain The hope that woman, made to minister To momentary passion, can provide Solace and inspiration to her mate. She breeds no hope; she cannot offer us A clime for our ideals and our dreams, Or plant a footstep soft as memory’s Across futurity’s unimpressed sands. (p. 8)

He dedicates himself to the Catholic faith and leaves civic life for a monastery with his friend Marcomir, to whom he has issued the warning, ‘do not put your trust in Time’: leap to God! Have done with age and death and faltering friends, Assailing circumstance, the change of front That one is always meeting in oneself, The plans, the vacillations – let them go! And you will put on immortality As simply as a vesture. (p. 25)

Indeed, once at the monastery, Carloman asks to retreat further into stillness and silence: ‘we bound our hearts / And brains and bodies with the fearful oath / To live in God, and the great Tempter – Time – / Has thwarted us persistently with bondage / Of interruption’ (p. 34). Yet, as soon as Carloman experiences an extreme form of the centripetal (imprisonment in darkness) he emerges with a new desire to embrace the centrifugal once more: some seed indeed has germinated in the darkness. He realises that the Church doesn’t bring him closer to the real god, who, he decides, is to be found in the change and flux of nature

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rather than in the eternal verities of the established church. He comes to think of the bondage he willingly embraced (and sought to intensify) as something he must now escape: ‘We must escape / From anything that is become a bond, / No matter who has forged the chain, – ourselves, / An enemy, a friend’ (p. 42). He now dedicates himself once more to flux and the centrifugal. Time is no longer the tempter, but ‘Is God’s own movement’, signifying the changeability which is life (p. 45). Now Carloman’s manifesto for centrifugal forces has him praising the ‘hack and murder’ he rejected at the start of the play: That we must give our natures to the air, To light and liberty, suppressing nothing, ... . . . Better far Murder and rapine in the city-streets, Than lust and hatred’s unfulfilled desires! (p. 47)

With this, Carloman tries to lead a revolt of the monks so that they may break free of the monastery gates. Yet just at this moment the gates are opened by Astolph, who has come to ask Carloman to prevent his ruling brother entering into a pact with Pope Zacharias. Thus Carloman and Marcomir are able to escape the monastery and arrive back at the palace. Unfortunately Zacharias has already reached the same destination and they are too late to prevent the alliance. This does, however, afford the chance for confrontation between Carloman’s new centrifugal beliefs and the religious establishment. Carloman again reaffirms that to be alive one has to be in time, ‘not a slave who sleeps through Time, unable / To share its agitation’ (p. 74). Moreover, Carloman makes it clear that he has not forsaken God, but rather that he has realised where the true God dwells. He tells the Church that he has been sent to convert them to the true religion of flux, in which God is ‘just to-day – / Not dreaming of the future, – in itself ’, while they declare continued belief in the eternal and the immutable (p. 76). Carloman is thrown in prison. In the cell, Carloman realises that his belief in the ability of the flux of nature to provide the truths of life is also false. The river rushing by, which has been Carloman’s talisman of his religion of time and the power of mutable nature, ceases to reassure. Carloman believes that ‘Time has played me false’ (p. 83), and finally is without God. Just as Carloman becomes disillusioned with God and time, Marcomir decides he has understood Carloman’s preaching and found life’s secret in the sound of

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the river: ‘Do you hear / How the Rhone sings outside? [ . . . .] at last I have its secret’ (p. 90). Yet this is simultaneously the moment when Carloman realises ‘There is no secret hid in life – illusion, / That is the great discovery’ (p. 91). He dies uttering his final realisation, which is a belief in the value of the simple things in life: ‘Fellowship, Pleasure / These are the treasure – / So I believe, so in the name of Time . . . ’ (p. 93). These alternating phases of the centripetal and the centrifugal do not bring satisfaction. On the one hand the centrifugal force brings the colour, variety and flux of the phenomenal world, freeing the individual from bonds of authority; yet it is simultaneously undirected, restless, and individual to the point of solipsism.58 The restless rush of the river Carloman invokes in his second centrifugal phase says it all. Yet the centripetal did not bring him any more satisfaction. This tendency, which embraces form, order and everything that is earnest and dignified, is, like Carloman’s life in the monastery, limiting and colourless, as well as calm and unifying. The play is declared a ‘tragedy’ on the title page because Carloman can find satisfaction in neither state, and never does find the ‘religion of life’ even though he glimpses it on several occasions. His final deathbed realisation of the supreme importance of fellowship and pleasure seems to be an abandonment of his quest for the ultimate truth. While this is the final realisation, there is no reassurance within the play that this isn’t just another false dawn for Carloman. The reader is left not knowing whether the authors are advocating the truth of this final pronouncement, or whether they are merely offering another stage in the cycle of Carloman’s tragic inability to make sense of life. This play poses an unanswered question; like so many of Michael Field’s dramas, it sets out a dialectic but fails to find an aesthetically pleasing resolution. This is strange because Carloman’s story is to a large extent Bradley and Cooper’s. Their depiction of alternating phases of Christianity and emancipating paganism within their own lives are at some level an embodiment of the same centripetal and centrifugal cycles, and within their life-narrative Bradley and Cooper found a very aesthetic resolution.59 By the time of the women’s conversion to Catholicism, they are combining the centripetal (Christian) and the centrifugal (pagan) impulses in order to reconcile their past life with their new-found religious calling. It is in this way that they escape the tragedy of Carloman, and it is in this way that Michael Field comes not just to practise aestheticism, but to embody it. Michael Field’s life-narrative resembles that of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean in that both constitute a study of the close connection between the

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‘Michael Field’

personal and the historical narrative.60 The setting of Pater’s novel on the boundary between paganism and Christianity enables him to explore those large-scale cycles that shape history, but also the personal crisis of warring centrifugal and centripetal forces. In his turn to the spiritual world, Marius refuses to abandon the material: what he gained from the pagan world is gradually remoulded in Christian form, and one becomes the continuation of the other. His death provides some kind of resolution when, disguised as Cornelius, he becomes as much Christian martyr as pagan aesthete and signifies the possible unity of the two. This process of aesthetic reconciliation is theorised fully by Pater in his essays. In Greek Studies he both recognises the tendency to see an alternation of centrifugal and centripetal forces within consecutive historical periods, and sees that great art must achieve an accommodation between them.61 Similarly, in ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ Pater dwells repeatedly on the relationship between the Hellenistic and the medieval, seeing the pagan and the Christian intimately intertwined within the Medieval Arthurian legends whose origin was ‘prior to Christianity’. He is delighted by the way that these originally pre-Christian tales ‘yield all their sweetness only in a Christian atmosphere’, and traces in them the choice between Christ and a rival lover ‘for whom these words and images and refined ways of sentiment were first devised’.62 Michael Field was hugely influenced by such work, and Bradley wrote to John Miller Gray in praise of Marius as soon as they finished reading it.63 Read in this light, Carloman’s life is a microcosmic representation of larger-scale cycles of history, and it becomes even more striking that he fails to find the artistic union of these alternating forces theorised by Pater and others. The play comes close to this discovery on occasions. For example, Carloman’s answer to Marcomir’s question as to whether our past sins can ever be erased or dropped gets close to asserting the kind of paradox Pater advocates: Never, there is no need. Life seizes all Its own vile refuse, hurries it along To something different; religion makes The master-change, turning our black to white; But so, as from earth’s foulness, the stem drains Corruption upward, and the cleanly flower Waves like a flame at last. (p. 46)

Yet the tragedy of the play is the inability to grasp these insights. It is at this point that we must turn to Michael Field’s poetry, which has Pater’s paradoxical aesthetic at its heart. What the authors could not quite

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achieve in the dialectic of the drama was already enabling their poetry to reach greater heights of artistic success. That interest in cyclical historical models, first examined in this chapter in the diary narrative, is presented in a more focused manner in the drama, which acts as a symbolic manifesto for the concerns about time and history that structured, then, women’s artistic engagement with the world. Yet the drama does not inhabit those issues aesthetically. It is for this reason that this study is primarily devoted to the poetry, the arena in which these dilemmas are most comprehensively turned into art, and where the problems are not just dramatised but resolved. The theories that seem so heavily indebted to Pater and Nietzsche in the dramas come into their own when taken over into the lyric mode. What seems a little derivative in the dramas creates a poetry which strains productively against the grain of the Victorian lyric whilst inhabiting its form. Although in this chapter I have made a case for Michael Field’s interest in history and time by tracing many different kinds of patterning, the rest of this book will be concerned primarily with just one very specific temporal conceit, which can be extracted from the above discussion. What I have here identified as centrifugal and centripetal forces are more accurately described in the poetry as synchronic and diachronic structures. I will leave behind Pater’s terminology because it is, finally, and more specifically, the purely temporal dimension of the centrifugal and the centripetal that becomes important in the poetry. The centrifugal, with its emphasis on restless flux and variety, is at heart a diachronic, time-bound, force; while the centripetal, with its tendency towards stasis, order and unity, is in essence synchronic and outside of the chronological. Poetry offered the perfect arena for Michael Field’s experimental fusion of the diachronic and synchronic. The general interest in models of time and history, introduced here in the context of the life-writing and the historical drama, becomes much more vivid when Bradley and Cooper translate it – within the form of this much more precise temporal dialectic – into a genre which is not intrinsically historical.

c h ap t e r 2

Long Ago: the male pseudonym, fin-de-sie`cle sexualities and Sappho’s historical leap

Within the body of Michael Field criticism it is the operation of the male pseudonym, in the sociosexual realm and the textual domain, that has attracted the most attention. Such discussion has taken place almost entirely in relation to the Sapphic lyrics of Long Ago (1889). This chapter is therefore well placed to introduce the major part of the critical debate. The pseudonym raises issues of number as well as gender – and these are dealt with, albeit to a lesser extent, in the critical literature I will survey – but my exploration of the duality of Michael Field’s authorship will be saved for Chapter 4, where I suggest that Underneath the Bough addresses such issues more specifically. This may seem a slightly artificial separation of two aspects of the pseudonym, but it is a necessary one, and one that is justified by Michael Field’s conception of each volume of poetry as based around a quite distinct set of concerns, and, usually, one overriding conceit. After introducing current critical thinking on the workings of the pseudonym, I situate Bradley and Cooper’s use of the male name more tightly within late nineteenth-century debates about sexuality. In so doing, I will suggest a new ‘fetishistic’ understanding of its operation which will bring together the main concerns of this chapter and enable a reading of Long Ago in their light. Finally, I will briefly return to the issues of time and history that were so important to the narrative of the diaries, to suggest that a rethinking of the volume within this framework uncovers a significance usually obscured by the critical focus on gender and sexuality. sex and the pseudonym Long Ago was the first volume of poetry published under the ‘Michael Field’ name and is inevitably concerned, in part, with the effect of this 42

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decision on lyric identity. Textually, the pseudonym has a very important role; Cooper asks Browning to alert them, ‘If you should find any tricks of style, any individual mannerisms[,] that break the unity of our work’.1 Its use was probably driven initially more by the needs of their drama than their poetry. (It was the drama they hoped would sell to a bigger audience and bring them fame.) But, when used for their publication of lyric poetry, it set the stage for some challenging experiments with the genre. It is no coincidence that the first volume of poetry published under the name ‘Michael Field’ was instantly complicated by being mediated also through the voice of Sappho. The true identity of Michael Field was known long before 1889. The feminine aspect of Michael Field’s identity was revealed almost immediately. In 1884, Bradley (in her own name) wrote to Robert Browning, whom she had already sworn to secrecy on the issue, begging him not to reveal their deeper secret – their duality: we humbly fear you are destroying this philosophic truth: it is said The Athenaeum was taught by you to use the feminine pronoun. [ . . . .] But I write to you to beg you to set the critics on a wrong track. We each know that you mean good to us; & are persuaded you thought by ‘our secret’ we meant the dual authorship. The revelation of that would indeed be utter ruin to us; but the report of ladyauthorship will dwarf & enfeeble our work at every turn.2

The duality of their authorship was, nonetheless, common knowledge not long after. In her biography, Mary Sturgeon attributes the neglect of the women’s work, from the 1890s to the end of their lives, to the fact that their collaboration, once known, was ‘obscurely repellent’ to the public.3 Angela Leighton notes that it is not clear whether this objection is purely textual, or whether it has a sexual significance also, but she does point to Walter Besant’s ‘On Literary Collaboration’ for corroboration that collaboration threatened ‘some notional sanctity of authorship’. While not accepting Sturgeon’s sense of a deliberate plot to undermine anything published under the name of Michael Field, Leighton does concede that knowledge of their collaboration probably did play a role in hampering their poetic reputation.4 This sentiment is echoed and developed by Holly Laird in her discussion of the importance for poetry of ‘single, identifiable authorship’ in the nineteenth century.5 It may be clear why Bradley and Cooper felt the need to hide their collaboration behind a single name, but the impetus behind choosing a male pseudonym has been much debated. The fact that Victorian women poets had problems to contend with when they tried to inhabit

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post-Romantic poetic conventions is undeniable. Yet nineteenth-century women writers seem to have had little trouble actually getting works printed, and there is some evidence that certain kinds of fictional publication may have been easier under a woman’s name.6 In fact it is this ease which is more likely to present a problem for the serious literary woman. Bradley and Cooper are not unusual in claiming to use the male pseudonym to escape the meaningless flattery given to female authors.7 Bradley writes to Robert Browning that by letting out the secret of their identity ‘you are robbing us of real criticism – such as man gives man. The gods learn little from the stupid words addressed to them at shrines: they disguise; meet mortals unsuspecting in the market place, & enjoy wholesome intercourse’.8 In the same letter they also claim the male name enables them to access certain discourses uncontroversially: the report of lady-authorship will dwarf & enfeeble our work at every turn. [ . . . .] And we have many things to say the world will not tolerate from a woman’s lips. We must be free as dramatists to work out in the open air of nature – exposed to her vicissitudes, witnessing her terrors: we cannot be stifled in drawing-room conventionalities.9

A subsequent letter glosses this claim, making it clear, crucially, that they do not feel the need to shock or to break society’s taboos, they simply feel, ‘we could not be scared away as ladies from the tragic elements of life’.10 John Ruskin’s strict instructions as to what Bradley and Cooper should and shouldn’t read and write no doubt laid the foundations for a particularly conservative idea of the proper sphere of women’s work.11 Catherine A. Judd writes that nineteenth-century women writers who wrote under a male pseudonym often used it to separate off the public self from the private self to keep the feminine identity pure and free from tarnish by the market.12 At this time the male pseudonym is not necessarily associated with the ‘mannish woman’ or the woman who wanted to pretend to be a man in any thoroughgoing way. The pseudonym was in many ways a conservative force for enabling women to write, while not challenging the idea that there were areas of commerce and expression that ‘ladies’ could not enter without a veil. This is one way of interpreting Bradley and Cooper’s claims: they want to be able to access areas not readily open to women writers, but without having to shock society, and without having to fight the political battle necessary to claim these areas as suitable for their sex. This is perhaps even more true when the sobriquet continues to be used after the true authorial identity is known. At this stage the name

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ceases to be a pseudonym as such, and it takes on a dual and contradictory significance. As Kathy Psomiades has noted, on the one hand it seems to reinforce the ideology of this conservative gender politics, as the women continue to demur to the male name after any practical benefit has gone, but on the other hand retaining the name could be interpreted as an audacious declaration of the women’s ability to occupy both masculine and feminine spheres.13 It is also the case that the continued use of the pseudonym strangely combines the public writerly persona of the women with an expression of their intimacy. The shared pseudonym was a close reflection of a particular erotic discourse created by the two women to figure their relationship with one another, and it is almost as if it provides a closer bond than the sharing of the name through marriage. This dual significance of the exposed pseudonym, both conservative and radical, is typical of the Michael Field aesthetic, and is consciously a foundation stone in the conception of Long Ago. Critics have often related questions concerning the role of the pseudonym to issues surrounding Bradley and Cooper’s sexuality, and I will continue to do so. However, rather than seeing the masculinity of the name as playing a role in the construction of a proto-lesbian identity, I argue that the ambivalence of the workings of the exposed pseudonym should be carried over into our reading of Bradley and Cooper’s construction of their erotic identity. Much debate has ensued about whether we can legitimately think of Bradley and Cooper as homosexual, or whether they constitute, rather, a prime example of what Lillian Faderman calls ‘romantic friendship’.14 In other words, could Bradley and Cooper have figured their relationship in lesbian terms when that category was only just beginning to be recognised? This is a particularly important question in relation to the perceived Sapphism of Long Ago, but one which, as I will show after exploring recent criticism on this issue, misses the point of Bradley and Cooper’s deliberately amorphous sexual identity. Virginia Blain writes of Bradley and Cooper that ‘The question of how to be a lesbian when lesbians did not exist does not appear to have troubled them’.15 Blain’s assertion is based on a thorough familiarity with the manuscript materials and she quotes from the correspondence between the two women held in the Bodleian Library to trace the development of their relationship. Blain places the start of their physical intimacy in 1885, when Edith was twenty-three. By 1885, she notes, they were addressing each other in letters in terms such as ‘Sweet Wife’ and ‘my own husband’.16 The discourses of desire in such letters, Blain argues, tell us in the clearest possible terms available, without resorting to a

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‘Michael Field’

discourse that would have been considered pornographic, that their passion is the same as that on which marriage is based.17 It is true that Bradley even writes to Cooper of the hardships of ‘early married life’ at one point; Cooper affirms that ‘I have given myself to you as your spouse for ever’ on another occasion; and the letters also contain a good deal of the kind of ‘baby talk’ that seems so unmistakably a language of romantic love (the wooing ‘stock dove’ (Bradley) and the fragile ‘kitten’ (Cooper) ‘Coo, coo’ and ‘mew, mew’ to each other on the page).18 In the diaries there is plenty of evidence to suggest that when the women describe themselves as ‘lovers’ they mean more than just each other’s carers. Late in 1912, when Bradley has been looking after Cooper in her cancerous sickness, she describes how they love one another ‘as if there were none else in the world’. She goes on: ‘Officially this night I abandon my quality of nurse. I take off my white apron. I become again her master & her lover’.19 Yet if we are to accept Blain’s argument that these private discourses between the two women express sexual desire, then we have to ask how, at a time of dawning sexological investigation, such an unconcerned voicing of homosexual desire could exist – particularly given what I described earlier as the quasi-public status of the diaries and the use of these personal discourses to underpin their published poetry. Lillian Faderman writes: ‘If they saw something unorthodox about their relationship, they would have been more reticent in their poems to each other’.20 Isn’t Bradley and Cooper’s lack of shame and their overt display of their relationship itself proof that their relationship should be classed a ‘romantic friendship’? Not necessarily. Foucault suggests that the creation of the category ‘homosexuality’ brought into being a specific ‘type’ of person where before there had simply been certain sexual acts which could be identified without reference to the type of person practising them. Of course Foucault’s thesis has not gone uncontested, but this shift from ‘doing’ and ‘being’ is still a key one in the history of sexuality. Yet, because of the rather different history of female intimacy, the sexological revolution concentrated on the female homosexual ‘type’ as a question somewhat divorced from ‘doing’. Intimate acts between women were considered so natural and so much a part of Victorian womanhood that these acts had to be allowed to continue separate from the new lesbian type that was being recognised. For this reason, as Richard Dellamora and others have noted, Havelock Ellis defined the lesbian ‘not on the basis of sexual inversion but on the basis of gender inversion’.21 In his study, Sexual Inversion (first published in English in 1897), Ellis includes only women of a particularly masculine

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disposition – some of whom had had no sexual contact with other women. This leads one to suspect that other ‘types’ of women, whatever their practice, may have been above suspicion of perversion. While other sexologists theorised female inversion, Ellis was, without a doubt, the most direct influence on Michael Field. Bradley and Cooper were corresponding with Havelock Ellis long before he published this book and were familiar with his work. They would have recognised that they were clearly not of the inverted type he describes as possessing a ‘more or less distinct trace of masculinity’.22 This trace, even when not obvious, can be detected in all sorts of instinctive gestures and habits [ . . . .] The brusque, energetic movements, the attitude of the arms, the direct speech, the inflexions of the voice, the masculine straightforwardness and sense of honor, and especially the attitude toward men, free from any suggestion either of shyness or audacity, will often suggest the underlying principle abnormality to a keen observer.23

Nothing ever reported of Bradley and Cooper suggests this type. Their flirtatious and coy behaviour with men, as well as their feminine wiles and aesthetic feminine dress, denote nothing of this sort. Ellis does connect the invert with a politics with which Bradley and Cooper were allied – ‘the modern movement of emancipation – the movement to obtain the same rights and duties, the same freedom and responsibility, the same education and the same work’ – but the ‘true invert’ was an aberration.24 Ellis notes that the lesbian ‘may not be, and frequently is not, what would be called a ‘‘mannish’’ woman’, because some women imitate men on grounds of ‘taste and habit unconnected with sexual perversion’.25 For the inverted woman, on the other hand, masculine traits are unwitting and inherent. Thus Bradley and Cooper’s ‘mannish’ pseudonym does not in any way display the unconscious masculine qualities which define the invert. Indeed, their own sexual identity seems to have been quite at odds with that masculine type. When Katharine and Edith visit Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther-Thompson, for example, they are repelled by their severe tailoring and their lack of feminine delicacy. Bradley describes them succinctly: ‘Anstruther tall – & big-jointed, Veronia an untidy mess of oddity perversion’ (it is here that Cooper identifies Lee as an ‘intellectual Vampire’ and comments on her ‘ghastly good-breed’).26 The sexological language of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, for example, could not be more removed from Michael Field’s textual universe. However, the matter is not quite so clear cut. In his more personal writing about his lesbian wife, Edith, Ellis changes tack slightly: ‘she was

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not really man at all in any degree, but always woman, boy, and child, and these three, it seemed, in almost equal measure’.27 At times when she was with a woman to whom she was attracted, ‘she had all the air and spirit of an eager boy, even the deliberate poses and gestures of a boy, never of a man [ . . . .] To Lily [her companion] this boyish ardour was certainly delightful, as delightful as was Lily’s ethereal fragility to Edith’.28 This is a description that is more recognisable in the way Bradley and Cooper figured their passion, and it suggests that Bradley and Cooper may have had a rather more nuanced relationship with discourses of homosexuality than I have so far suggested. Martha Vicinus has written insightfully on the figure of the boy in fin-de-sie`cle literature as a homosexual signifier for both men and women: ‘Even though many male homosexuals were not pederasts and most lesbians did not look like boys, the boy was the defining, free agent who best expressed who they were’.29 In fact, Edith Cooper was boyish, and it was certainly her androgynous looks, enhanced by her newly short hair, that were attractive to both Bradley and her female nurse when she was ill with fever in Dresden.30 Indeed, letters in the Bodleian archive see Bradley signing off, ‘I must now go out – oh my Pretty, my Love. Henry, my Boy!’31 While not typical inverts, the women’s various registers of desire reverberated with some of the less visible, but tacitly acknowledged, versions of homoeroticism. Indeed, Andre´ Raffalovich commented to John Gray about Michael Field that he ‘was sure that they were inverti, most probably chaste’.32 All of this problematises Holly Laird’s suggestion that the lack of censure of Bradley and Cooper’s relationship might help us to identify it as ‘romantic friendship’. Certain formations of desire between women were less likely to attract attention and censure than others. Michael Field were, clearly, attracted to men, desired men, and they sought out their company: this must warn us against any solely ‘lesbian’ reading of the women’s sexuality. Yet Bradley and Cooper themselves worry about how their relationship might be perceived, particularly once they have converted to Catholicism. Cooper is anxious about having to confess her ‘secret sins’ (which she equates with the ‘anguish of the 3rd, 4th, & 5th verses of Femmes Damne´es’ in which the fragile, and recently deflowered, Hippolyte weeps for her lost innocent, as Delphine, her seducer, stretches out gloatingly, joyfully and predatorially at her feet)33 because ‘There is nothing this young seminarist might not misconceive – even our Sacred Relation to each other . . . ’.34 Even very early on in their relationship there is evidence of the women’s family being unhappy about the intensity of their feelings for

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one another, and this adds yet another twist to this tale. Such material has not previously been drawn into the debate around Michael Field’s sexuality. In the spring of 1885 Bradley and Cooper were apart (kept apart by Cooper’s mother), and writing letters to each other. ‘Mother’ features regularly in their letters, and Cooper’s mother was, in a way, a parental figure for Bradley too: Bradley moved into her sister’s household when she was still in her teens and her sibling played an important role in her upbringing. On 13 April 1885, Bradley writes to Cooper from Sidmouth, ‘Mother must have a heart of stone if after this [a poetic tribute of her passion entitled ‘‘The Stock Dove’s Sacrament’’] she keeps you from me’.35 On 16 April 1885 she sends Cooper a poem – ‘Two of Us’ – which is an exhortation to Christ to bless the women’s unity under the single name.36 Bradley writes on the back a letter to ‘P.’ (‘Puss’, or Edith) about further trouble with ‘Mother’37 and plots to meet up in spite of her. After her endearments to Cooper she begins, ‘Tell Mother she is a real scamp, – a scoundrel of the blackest dye [ . . . .] Tell her to beware: her hand is on a lion’s mane’. Then Bradley begins to lay the plan for how the two of them will manage to meet in London and spend some time alone: Mother wd. be happy about you if you were at Kensington: & I should not attempt any theatres or night excitement. But we will wait. Meanwhile prepare for Weston Mare warm clothes; for next week I mean to have you; indeed I shall not come home till they send you to fetch me. That will bring parents to their senses. [ . . . .] Now put down its moral paws: & love me. P. P. [Persian Puss] come to me: it is not natural for us to live apart.38

Exactly what Cooper’s mother’s objections were, we don’t know, and she is eventually reconciled to the relationship, but at this early stage she does appear to want to keep her daughter from her sister. It certainly was possible, even before the advent of sexological categorisation, for families to worry about a desire which was both known and unknown, both possible and impossible.39 Cooper’s replies to the letters quoted above are rather less passionate, and don’t reciprocate fully the urgency of Bradley’s prose: she is clearly caught between allegiances to her mother and to her aunt.40 Michael Field’s use of the male pseudonym does not seem, then, to gesture towards the masculinity that was becoming characteristic of the invert. Nonetheless, Bradley and Cooper’s relationship did elicit some anxiety, and they were not completely out of the reach of new theories of homosexuality. In order to approach Long Ago with the requisite tact, we need to recognise the spectrum of positions which existed within the late

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nineteenth-century conception of sexual identity, and Michael Field’s ability to manoeuvre skilfully amongst them. Some of the most interesting work done on the idiosyncrasy and diversity of the language of love in the work of Michael Field is by Chris White.41 White argues for Michael Field’s ability to collect tropes, images and metaphors from other discourses in order to create their own vocabulary for, as White sees it, their ‘women-loving women’ desire: Michael Field, rather than inventing a vocabulary with an unmistakable precision of meaning, deploys the language of classical scholarship, the language of love belonging to heterosexuality, the language of friendship (but never noticeably the language of blood-relatives), and later the language of Catholicism.42

White attends to the vivid and varied depictions of female desire apparent in the period in order to oppose ‘sweeping generalizations about ‘‘romantic friendship’’ ’.43 The Sapphism of Long Ago has, without doubt, been at the centre of such attempts to read the lesbian in Michael Field’s work. In this chapter I focus particularly on the erotic context of Long Ago and the relatively well-worn critical debate about the Sapphic.44 However, I will suggest that rather than finding a new lesbian significance in Sappho, Long Ago focuses on this figure because she represents a category-defying mixture of sexual imagery which usefully tropes the identity configured within the space that is ‘Michael Field’. In their poetry, as in their diaries (which chart their infatuations with various men as well as their delight in one another), Bradley and Cooper created a deliberately amorphous sexual identity which avoided commitment to any one position. I will term their relationship with each other ‘homoerotic’ throughout this book in order to convey this deliberate lack of sexual definition. After all, quotations cited by critics as clear evidence of the women’s identification with homosexual discourse often turn out to be extremely ambivalent and tend to work against a lesbian appropriation of Michael Field. A good example is Bradley’s letter to Frances and John Brooks (Bradley’s first cousin and her husband) which expresses her interest in ‘find[ing] 2 men living together exactly as Henry & I live. Ricketts adores Shannon as I adore Henry’.45 Ricketts and Shannon may have given the women terms with which to express their relationship (particularly the language of ‘fellowship’),46 but it is by no means clear that this comparison provides the women with a straightforwardly homosexual expression of their love. As early as 1899 Bradley and Cooper confide to

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the diaries that Ricketts’ strange behaviour may well indicate that Shannon was, again, involved with a woman: ‘We think he is in love – or under influence of a woman. There seems that loneliness about Ricketts that comes when ‘‘the fellow’’ is seduced from devotion to his fellow’.47 The relationship between Ricketts and Shannon encodes primarily a struggle between homo- and heteroerotic desire, and this, I think, is what Cooper wants to capture; including, by implication, a reference to her own potential for hetero-erotic desire. Whatever the relationship between the two women it cannot be denied that both had strong desires for men also, and Cooper, particularly, articulates feelings that suggest she, like Shannon, feels torn: I am without my Love, in the twilight, when at the best one is sad to death. She is in Oxford. I am here a fragment. But I love my art & will not dare to injure it – I love my own Love & could not do violence to her or myself – so let her not fear. Although those [insert] ‘the Doctrine’s’ [Berenson’s] [end insert] wonderful eyes – ho a Faun’s crossed with the traditional Christ’s – pursue me, with [insert] tho’ they have [end insert] a charm that maddens, I will never go off to the hills [ . . . ]. There is no fellowship, no caress, no tight winding-together of two natures, no tenderness when my Love is severed from me; and there seems to be no life in people – no life to be got any where – if one is withdrawn from the Doctrine. So I sit by my table doubly dead.48

Indeed, there is some evidence that Cooper plays with a fluid erotic identity, quite deliberately aware of its power. While away in Paris with Bernhard and Mary, Cooper is ill and (with Bradley also present) receives a visit from Bernhard, sitting by her bed. She notes with some annoyance, ‘But Mary will not let us have him to ourselves & she totters in to lie again by me, like a drift of snow’. Yet Cooper is not above exploiting the situation: ‘I stoop to kiss her – half to teaze [sic] him! With a flash of envy that ends with in a smile he says ‘‘For once in his life he would like to be a girl’’ ’.49 Such knowing and manipulative negotiation of the erotic must inform our critical appreciation of the work of Michael Field.

long ago and fetishistic ambivalence Long Ago contains sixty-eight verses, each written around a Sapphic fragment. Most poems are narrated by Sappho, and the volume enacts a negotiation between Michael Field’s lyric voice and Sappho’s. Bradley herself had learned Greek and Latin while she was at Newnham College; and she taught Cooper so they could study Sappho’s Greek together.

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However, the classics remained a male domain even after some women gained access to a classical education, as Bradley and Cooper knew full well. Yopie Prins writes that ‘By imitating Sappho’s Greek fragments, Michael Field enters into a domain often coded as masculine, and, by the end of the nineteenth century, increasingly homosexual [by which Prins means male homosexuality]’. Prins goes on to point out that Michael Field’s use of the Sapphic literature indicates a fascination with the tropes of male homosexuality rather than a way of accessing a ‘ready-made’ lesbian discourse.50 Insofar as Sappho was a role model for women in the nineteenth century, she was, before the Wharton edition of Sappho became available in 1885, known chiefly through Ovid’s ‘Sappho to Phaon’, where she was construed as the heterosexual abandoned woman, lamenting the loss of her man. Even when the Wharton edition of the fragments was published, bringing to light a newly homoerotic Sappho, she was configured more as a ‘schoolmistress for young women’.51 It remained, Prins concludes, for Michael Field to read a more lesbian Sappho into and out of Wharton’s text.52 Kate Flint also sketches a history of the woman poet’s use of Sappho in the nineteenth century, and similarly concludes that it is only in Michael Field’s hands ‘that Sappho’s lesbianism is reasserted’.53 Yet, for me, the real puzzle is why Long Ago isn’t more involved with the newly uncovered homoeroticism of Sappho. This volume is written at a point when the traditional iconography of Sappho has just been challenged by the revisionary work of Henry Wharton. Bradley and Cooper write a note in the back of the book explaining: The Greek text followed is that of Bergk in his Poetae Lyrici Graeci. I take this opportunity of expressing my indebtedness to Dr. Wharton’s Sappho, A Memoir and Translation, a work which will be found of the highest value by those who desire to obtain a vivid impression of the personality, the influence, and the environment of the poet.

Yet, in spite of the note of thanks to Wharton, Bradley and Cooper go back to the Greek text and, in many respects, find in it a conservative reading of Sappho. As a consequence they still structure the volume around Sappho’s love for Phaon, his rejection of her, and her leap. The epigraph, and poem I, do invoke the ‘maiden choir’, identifying the combined voices of Bradley, Cooper and Sappho, as a female lyric community. Poem II changes the focus by introducing Sappho’s lust for Phaon and poem III dwells on his withholding of desire. Poem IV plots how to ensnare the fugitive of her love. After this initial focus on Phaon,

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his presence is reduced to a dull ache haunting the poetry. Poem XXXII marks, roughly, a middle point in the book and returns in earnest to Sappho’s desire for Phaon, lamenting again his unresponsiveness to her love. The last six poems return to Phaon and chart his refusal to be smitten by love for her, his withdrawal to Sicily, her abandonment and her desperate leap. Love for Phaon, and his rejection, structures the narrative of the volume, but numerous other figures populate it and fill it with a veritable orgy of loves: Erinna, Aphrodite, the Graces, Adonis, Mnasidica, Alcaeus, Gorgo, Anactoria, Leto and Niobe, Selene, Anacreon . . . There are poems depicting a pleasurable community of women, but to foreground them risks distorting the impression given by the volume as a whole. A painful and unrequited heterosexual passion frames the book, and, in spite of the multifarious desires that rage throughout the poetry, there seems to be an absence at its centre. However, although the volume cannot be read as a celebration of lesbian desire, it would also be wrong to see it as primarily about unrequited heterosexual love. Some critics do recognise that Sappho was not, primarily, a lesbian figure in Michael Field’s poetry. In an essay indebted, in part, to Wayne Koestenbaum’s work on literary collaboration, and his concept of ‘double talk’, Holly Laird writes of the ‘contradictory heritage’ Michael Field left their readers – the simultaneous subversive challenge to, yet ‘subtly complicit cooperation with’, social norms.54 Bearing in mind that many Michael Field editions were limited in their sales and circulated primarily among a group of readers who knew the women, there are good reasons for believing that Michael Field’s audience did find within the poetry a double narrative which spoke about both hetero- and homoerotic desire. Bradley and Cooper may have sometimes been drawing on idiosyncratic and novel sources for their erotic discourse, but readers of an educated type would have been conversant with the models they were using and the strategies they were employing to invoke a deliberately ambiguous narrative. Bradley and Cooper were using Sappho at this time precisely because, to the educated reader, up-to-date with the developments in Greek scholarship, Sappho represented a sexual ambivalence: still the lover of Phaon, but now also clearly linked with a homoerotic female community. Poem XXXIII (‘Maids, not to you my mind doth change’) compares Sappho’s love of men and of women, suggesting that both please, but in different ways. Heterosexual love is, here, as throughout the book, associated with pain, while the love of women is associated with ‘soft vitality’ (‘Between us is no thought of pain’). Love with men is changeable – ‘Men

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I defy, allure, estrange’ – while love with women is constant – ‘not to you my mind doth change’. This is a poem about ‘manifold desire’, and it is deliberately ambiguous on the question of which desire is the most fulfilling. When Sappho tells her maids that ‘Between us is no thought of pain, / Peril, satiety’, Bradley and Cooper could be stating that homoerotic passion may not bring pain, but neither can it satisfy. However, this line could just as well be read as a statement of the superiority of love between women, which does not cause pain, and is so fulfilling that Sappho’s desire for it could never be sated. The following two lines – ‘Soon doth a lover’s patience tire, / But ye to manifold desire / Can yield response’ – seem to suggest the validity of the latter reading, implying that man’s desire is aroused and then sated, while desire between women is able to maintain a more satisfying, multiple, response, which never tires. Yet, within the context of the book, the absence of pain in the love between Sappho and her maids suggests that this cannot be a truly passionate and fulfilling desire. In this book true passion is strongly connected with pain – ‘Love’s anguish, cark and care’ (poem XII, ‘Spring’s messenger we hail’). Poem III is an early and clear statement of the inevitable co-existence of pain and pleasure in desire – ‘The bliss of honey and of bee’ – while poem XXXVIII (‘He towers ’mong men of other lands’) also speaks of ‘Passion’s unextricated pain’. That poem XXXIII is ambiguous in its evaluation of homo- and heteroerotic impulses, does not, I think, indicate an intention for the audience to resolve the poem into their preferred reading. Rather, the poem exploits the current status of Sappho to figure two things simultaneously: two different desires which are both an intrinsic part of her persona. The question of whether Sappho’s maids leave her desire unsated (although helping to distract from the pain), or whether they satisfy a desire unrequited by Phaon, is again posed at the centre of poem LIV (‘A down the Lesbian vales’), where Sappho’s maidens bring her flowers, ‘My passionate, unsated sense to please’. Swinburne also invoked Sappho for her special ability to figure a variety of formations of desire between subject and object, which Swinburne exploited by, as Dellamora has noted, leaving unclear who is doing what to whom.55 Swinburne’s readers are not invited to resolve this tension one way or the other, but to read the text as multifaceted. Of course, there are crucial differences between Swinburne’s Sappho and Michael Field’s. For Swinburne, Sappho’s multifaceted desire is part of her identification, physically and otherwise, with the fragmented text. For Swinburne, she is an inherently disjointed persona. Bradley and Cooper,

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on the other hand, make Sappho’s lyrics whole again, and use Sappho’s ‘manifold desire’ to gesture towards a force which is all-encompassing and unifying. However, Swinburne’s Sapphic precedent is a key to recognising the lack of engagement with a sexual politics in Bradley and Cooper’s Sappho. In Long Ago the homoerotic isn’t hidden within the heteroerotic; rather, the two are intermingled in order to invoke a deliberately multifaceted, amorphous, desire. Although Phaon’s rejection and absence structures the book, the driving lyric force is Sappho’s presence and her passion. It is the power of desire that Michael Field celebrates here. The many discourses of desire in Long Ago should not be resolved into the service of a complex articulation of a unified, homoerotic, passion – or an unfulfilled heterosexual romance. Rather, these multiple discourses should be read as enabling an all-encompassing, nonspecific, notion of desire as a life-force which eclipses specific narratives in the volume. Whatever the difference of tone and style between the plays and the poetry, the plays, as much as the poetry, confirm that desire is most significant for Michael Field when it is made abstract. I have stated that the plays inhabit a more political, ‘real’ world than the poetry and are often concerned with questions of contemporary social significance. Attila, My Attila! (written between 1894–5, a few years later than Long Ago, and set in the decline of the Roman empire), for example, has as its central protagonist Honoria, who is identified in the preface as a ‘New Woman’ character. The play is in part about what happens when she, as a young girl, gets pregnant by a servant. Yet Honoria’s battle with her parents for sexual freedom turns to an abstracted parody of this theme when her thwarted desires take on a new perverse aspect in the form of her enchantment with Attila the Hun. This desire is a force potent enough, potentially, to bring down empires and change the course of history, yet Honoria has never met or spoken with the Hun. This play is a story of the New Woman and the unjust repression of her desire in comparison with that of her male contemporaries, but it is also a tale of desire and its power. Indeed, all the protagonists (New Women or otherwise) are defined by their erotic desires and/or their repression of them. The strength of these emotions drives the play. Closer to the free, wild and Dionysian Greek world of Long Ago is Callirrhoe¨ (published in 1884). This drama also depicts the ability of desire to bring down a whole community as Callirrhoe¨’s rejection of the Bacchic priest, Coresus, is punished by the plague. The gods can only be appeased by her death or that of a substitute. With no willing substitute on hand, Coresus must kill

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the thing he loves. Unable to bring himself to do it, he stabs himself instead. The result is that Callirrhoe¨ – up until this point a representative of the world of Apollonian order – declares herself a true Maenad and kills herself. Again, we see desire become abstracted in this Dionysian frenzy, and moved away from sociopolitical engagement over the course of the play. Callirrhoe¨’s inhabitation of a life of civic order at the start of the play becomes gradually more entangled with pagan forces. That she only desires Coresus once he is dead is evidence, once more, of the nonvisceral, non-specific, nature of the emotion. For desire to become the power that Bradley and Cooper value aesthetically it must become divorced from the specific, the political, the bodily, the visceral, and become a force much bigger than the individual. In order to discuss further the importance of this amorphous or ambivalent desire in relation to Long Ago, it is necessary to think more about the operation of the pseudonym, and in doing so to tie together my earlier exploration of Bradley and Cooper’s relationship in terms taken from contemporaneous discourses of sexology and my analysis of their textual strategy. What is needed is a new model that recognises the role the pseudonym plays in figuring desire between the two women, and which also explains its ability to signify the double narrative of simultaneous denial and expression that is a crucial part of Michael Field’s poetic strategy – and which is certainly central to any reading of the ambivalence of Sappho in Long Ago. I offer such a thing through a concept current in late nineteenth-century sexological discourse: the fetish. Invoking this model allows Bradley and Cooper to be seen to be opposing the new vogue for sexual categorisation and definition through its own conceptual framework, thus demonstrating their ambivalence towards Havelock Ellis and the new ‘science’. The male pseudonym may not have been indicative of the masculinity of the invert, but it did function as a kind of fetish. Bradley and Cooper would almost certainly have been familiar with this concept – if only through their friend Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Here Ellis discusses ‘erotic fetichism’ and the possible objects of it. Ellis defined the fetish as that ‘tendency whereby sexual attraction is unduly exerted by some special part or peculiarity of the body, or by some inanimate object which has become associated with it’.56 This idea helps us understand Bradley and Cooper’s reification of the name as seen in defining poems such as ‘An Invocation: Two of Us’, where ultimately it is the signature that is important and that God is asked to bless. To develop this reading of the pseudonym I need to elaborate a little, theoretically, on the possible function of the fetish. In The Practice of

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Love, Teresa De Lauretis proposes a model of perverse desire based on Freud’s notion of the disavowal of the mother’s castration, and an unorthodox reading of fetishism. As a result of this disavowal: the subject’s desire is metonymically displaced, diverted onto another object or part of the body, clothing, hair, etc., which acts as a ‘substitute’ (Freud says) for the missing maternal penis.57

In Freud’s picture, however, fetishism cannot apply to women because they have nothing to lose – disavowal would not defend their ego from an ‘already accomplished’ castration. Nonetheless, Lauretis goes on to figure a lesbian fetish. This concept is necessary, Lauretis believes, to serve as ‘the sign or signifier of prohibition, difference and desire, without which the lesbian lovers would be simply, so to speak, two women in the same bed’.58 She is very keen to differentiate ‘woman identification’ from desire for a woman, the former being a notion of sisterhood and female bonding, the latter a lesbian relationship. For Lauretis, then, the lesbian fetish is any object or sign ‘that marks the difference and the desire between the lovers’.59 The lesbian fetishes are often, though not exclusively, items with connotations of masculinity. Unlike the male fetish of Freud’s account, the lesbian fetish is not a substitute for the phallus, although it is analogous to it. So, ‘the desire for the female body is displaced onto the fetish (the masculine clothes [ . . . ]) and at the same time resignified by it through the most strongly coded of cultural conventions, gender’.60 In this theorisation we can see an important distinction opening up between the inherent masculinity of the true invert, as described by Ellis earlier, and what Lauretis calls ‘the lesbian masculinity fetish’, which involves deliberately chosen masculine accoutrements, which could be sported by feminine women like Bradley and Cooper.61 Sometimes theories of the lesbian fetish cite the other woman as the fetish object,62 but Lauretis’s model is more useful for reading Bradley and Cooper, for whom it is the pseudonym itself which acts as the mannish signifier. This configuration allows a sharing of the fetishised name and an easy alteration between roles. Bradley and Cooper, while neither simply ‘inverts’ nor ‘lesbians’, do rely on difference to prevent narcissism within their relationship. In their case it is the masculine pseudonym, the only mannish thing about them, which marks that difference. While at the same time as acting as a sign of unity and non-differentiation in the public domain, it inscribes the recognition of difference and desire between the lovers in the private and

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poetic domain. It is what most clearly separates the women’s relationship from romantic friendships based on similarity, and it is what introduces an erotic tension while still allowing them to remain outside the category of the inverted. Ruth Vanita, like many other critics, situates Michael Field within a tradition of ‘likeness’. She writes of the Shakespearean economy of homoerotic likeness (within the sonnets), and she notes how this is a tradition continued in, for example, many of the female–female relationships depicted by Jane Austen, as well as Bradley and Cooper’s own relationship.63 Yet I insist that we use the idea of the fetishistic pseudonym to separate Bradley and Cooper from many of the examples given by Vanita (particularly Austen’s heroines), because it shows Bradley and Cooper’s relationship to be configured around difference not sameness. The necessity of this fetishistic difference is explained directly by Bradley in a letter in the archives in Edinburgh when she writes to John Gray, at the time of their conversion, about Cooper becoming her godmother. Bradley writes explaining how their relations with each other are getting muddled now that Cooper is ‘a mother’s godmother’.64 Bradley goes on to ask ‘your wisdom concerning the question of my God mother’: To me a relation is like this. lover & loved mother & child server & served – not mother & mother

Bradley sees that the difference in their roles is crucial to their relationship. Cooper, it seems, is too jealous to let anyone else take on the role of godmother to Bradley, however much Bradley likes the idea of some nubile young nun praying for her: But Henry shares with Heaven the great quality of jealousy, & no woman in the world may be allowed, I fear, except in the sky!! to pray for me. Would some dear little nun, the younger the better, give me her fresh young prayers – & be my God-mother.

It appears that Bradley doesn’t mind which of them play which role, but the above list indicates the necessity of preserving relationships of difference while simultaneously being able to move between positions. The male pseudonym is situated, conveniently, between the two women, allowing either of them to lay claim to its phallic signification to symbolise difference from the other.

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Yet the fetishistic pseudonym does not only function to inscribe a private eroticism. It also becomes a textual strategy for Bradley and Cooper. Such textualising of the fetish is not without contemporaneous precedent. Havelock Ellis links the fetish decisively to literary study when he gives Rossetti’s poem ‘The Woodspurge’ as ‘a concrete example of the formation of such a symbol’.65 Ellis also uses the poetry of Herrick (‘Delight in Disorder’, ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes’ and ‘Julia’s Petticoat’) to trace an ‘absolutely normal form’ of fetishism. The ‘indefinite and elusive’ fascination of the lover with the woman’s clothes shows Herrick to be ‘an admirable psychologist in matters of sexual attractiveness’.66 The fetishistic signifier of difference within sameness will underpin my investigation of paradox as a textual strategy throughout Michael Field’s work, but in a rather different way to Ellis’s textual readings. As Elizabeth A. Grosz states in ‘Lesbian Fetishism?’, ‘the fetishist wants to have his cake and eat it’, both acknowledging and refusing to accept the possibility of his own castration by way of the disavowal of maternal castration and appointing a fetish substitute.67 Indeed, the two women who occupy the one name dramatise the split embodied by the fetishist between disavowal and acceptance. Within the relationship of difference, one woman has to deny and one to accept: between them they embody that single ambivalence. One result of this simultaneous double narrative is, as Grosz explains, that the fetishist hasn’t committed to heterosexual or homosexual identity. Grosz notes that the male fetishist is someone who has refused to take up either the heterosexual paradigm (of abandoning the mother as love object and accepting the authority of the father) or the homosexual paradigm (accepting symbolic castration).68 This self-contradictory disavowal and acceptance, foregrounded by the theory of the fetish, is particularly important for my reading of Long Ago, explaining how Bradley and Cooper can be textually somehow in between the homosexual and the heterosexual narrative – having both. It is crucial to note at this point that the fetishist is not simply what we would currently know as the bisexual who accepts both identities: the fetish is a paradoxical structure because it is self-contradictory in a way the bisexual is not. In spite of its manifestation within a discourse designed to codify and define, fetishism offers women a paradigm of undecidability which can be co-opted as strategy rather than perversion. For Michael Field the fetishistic textual strategy leads to all manner of textual oscillation. In this study I argue that the paradox can be found at the heart of every book of poetry, although each time in a different guise. In Long Ago the founding paradox is most definitely a sexual one, crafted from the dialectic between homosexuality and heterosexuality.

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The poem within Long Ago that has received the most critical attention is, without doubt, that which centres on that ambiguously gendered figure from classical mythology, Tiresias. Chris White suggests, along with other critics, that Michael Field is a ‘Tiresian poet’, ‘whose strength derives from femaleness and whose authority derives from the masculine Poet identity which can change the world’.69 Elsewhere she argues for a strategic distancing of the feminine, not only through Bradley and Cooper’s use of the male name but, more specifically, through their use of the figure of Tiresias in this poem. White suggests that in this poem, ‘What is distinctive about womanhood, according to Michael Field, is here made explicit through defamiliarisation for Tiresias and the reader’.70 Poem LII tells the story of Tiresias and dramatises, at yet one further remove, the gender drama played out in Long Ago. As Prins summarises, ‘Tiresias embodies the contradictions of a poem written by two women (Bradley and Cooper) writing as a man (Michael Field) writing as a woman (Sappho) who writes about a man (Tiresias) who was once a woman’. ‘It is significant’, Prins goes on to say, ‘that the Greek epigraph to the Tiresias poem is also quoted in the preface to Long Ago, as introduction to the contradictory authorship of the entire volume’.71 Poem LII tells how Tiresias was changed into a woman for casually kicking out of his way the female of a couple of snakes that coil, copulating, in his path. On changing sex, he experiences an expansion of his range of vision, a greater ‘receptivity of soul’, and, of course, the greater sexual pleasure of women. In this version he lives seven years as a woman before becoming again a man. He is then called on by Hera to compare the joys of sex experienced by woman and man. Unfortunately Tiresias, having experienced both, fails to deliver the answer she wants, and so she blinds him. To replace his lost eyesight, so the myth usually goes, Zeus granted Tiresias the gift of prophecy. Yet, as critics have noted, Michael Field’s version of the story is distinctive in that the narrator (Sappho) attributes Tiresias’s powers of prophecy instead to his having been a woman and retained a woman’s consciousness: Thou hast been woman, and can’st see Therefore into futurity: It is not that Zeus gave thee power To look beyond the transient hour [ . . . ].

The blindness, on the other hand, is seen as a part of his masculinity. Critics have read this poem as an appeal to a mythic statement of

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women’s sexual pleasure that is idiosyncratically linked with a genderspecific power of insight. In general, critics have interpreted this long-winded route to the female voice as a strategy for enabling Bradley and Cooper to claim that voice in a more meaningful way. After all, at the end of the trail of masks is a voice that embodies their concerns about their own textual identity: the prophetic and poetic voice of the female Tiresias. This distancing strategy overcomes the problem of the assumed identity between the authorial and narratorial voice (which was so damaging to women’s poetry), while allowing Bradley and Cooper to enact and examine femininity critically. I have argued elsewhere that the pseudonym allowed the women to do something more than simply lay claim to a masculine authority: they declare their – false – masculinity, so as to be free to perform their feminine poetic identity in a way which, mimicking the strategy of the dandy, can be seen to interrogate preconceptions about gender.72 However, this multi-gendered performance has a deeper, and more textually significant, imperative. It is driven by a fetishistic desire not to have to decide – not to have to commit in terms of gender or sexuality – which underlies the whole book (as well as Bradley and Cooper’s conception of authorship in general). Rather than aiming to reclaim their femininity in a more meaningful way, Bradley and Cooper want to transcend the whole issue of gender. Talia Schaffer has written that ‘The female aesthetes’ gender ideologies were ambiguous, and we must regard their confusion as a political category in itself, rather than trying somehow to resolve it’.73 While I would not term Bradley and Cooper’s strategies ‘confused’, it is certainly true that attempts to resolve them into genderpolitical messages seem to miss the point of Tiresias and his fetishistic configuration of desire. The male pseudonym and the invocation of Sappho may appear to modern eyes to foreground a political commitment around issues of gender and sexuality, but for Bradley and Cooper they were rather used to enable the authors to avoid such commitment. If the Sapphic and ‘Michael Field’ masks – doubly mediating narrative voice in Long Ago – are designed to evade issues of gendered voice, it is hardly surprising that Michael Field’s Sappho appears framed explicitly by heterosexual narratives at the same moment that the Sapphic was beginning to represent a homoerotic identity. Bradley and Cooper’s fetishistic disavowal of sex and gender politics allows them to bring to the fore aesthetic concerns, and to treat desire as an aesthetic rather than a political category. Poem XXI takes as its conceit the necessity to poetry not only of the Muses, but also the Graces. Inspiration is more widely

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acknowledged as the force that powers poetry, but for Michael Field desire (the Graces here represent, and stimulate, the poet’s desire) is just as fundamental for art. Indeed, when the preface talks of turning ‘to the one woman who has dared to speak unfalteringly of the fearful mastery of love’, this is not a proclamation, as some critics have read it, of a lesbian role model. Sappho, for Michael Field, is an emblem of acute desire, rather than homosexual or heterosexual experience specifically. It is this desire that powers Michael Field’s ‘song’, and the two are interlinked in Long Ago: the ‘twin burthen of desire and song’ (poem L, ‘Muse of the golden throne, my griefs assuage –’). Poem XVII explores this connection through a contrast between Sappho and a night gathering of virgins who dance and sing in the light of the full moon to Sappho’s voice and music. Finally the virgin quire fall silent (‘Their lips were blanched as if with shame / That they in maidenhood were bold / Its sacred worship to unfold’) and Sappho is left alone, still playing her lyre, unsilenced. The poet is separate from the virgin quire; she has forever forsaken her maidenhood and the privileged state of those women who remain silent.74 Bradley and Cooper turn to Sappho because she connects desire and song in a way that is meaningful for them: she allows this connection to be made outside of the realm of sexological categories and so allows desire to be generalised and therefore more easily aestheticised. In Long Ago, Bradley and Cooper hover between masculine and feminine, homosexual and heterosexual, in a way that enables them to figure a disinterested desire free from commitment in the pragmatic realm. Desire, for Michael Field, is not primarily about gender or sexuality: it is a force which powers art. Bradley and Cooper cannot divorce themselves from the lived experience of women in women’s bodies. For this reason gendered readings of their work must be valid: they are ‘women poets’ (in at least one sense of that term) however much they dislike this. Various aspects of my reading in this book will be based precisely around the fact of their sex. Nor does my insistence on reading their fetishistic strategy mean that we can’t theorise their textual strategies in terms linked to sexuality.75 Indeed, the very refusal to commit that I have traced through the idea of the fetish in some sense foregrounds the issues evaded: in the current critical climate Michael Field’s strategy seems to invite questions, and assumptions, about the thing it avoids. But what must be recognised is the effort Bradley and Cooper went to in order to sidestep these issues within their work so that they could invoke an all-encompassing desire. All too often this strategy is overlooked because of the current trend to read issues of gender, sexuality and the body at the root of Michael Field’s poetic. Yet, far from proclaiming a lesbian

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identity, the ambivalence of late nineteenth-century Sappho was crucial to this attempt to inhabit an area between categories. ‘a great while since, a long, long time ago’ If we re-read Long Ago as a volume that, while figuring potent desire, does its best to avoid specific issues of sexuality and gender, then what is the point of this carefully themed collection? The answer lies, very prominently, in the title of the book: in ideas of history. Long Ago, while fetishistically balanced not to commit to debates around gender and sexuality, has a great commitment to history: and these two facts are related. Crucially, Sappho enabled this amorphous desire to be imagined apart from the viscerality and specificity of the body because these are the only aspects with which we can’t engage through the process of historical remembering. Moreover, Sappho acts for Michael Field as a representative of a thoroughly presexological age. What I have described here in terms of the fetish is Bradley and Cooper’s rejection of the framework of sexology. Their refusal to enter this system of signification is itself able to be modelled within that system. Yet their constant return to earlier periods of history (something which can be found in every one of their poetic volumes) is itself an attempt to step outside the sexological discourse and imagine a time when such categories didn’t exist. In Chapter 4, I will argue (in Foucault’s terms) that the ancient Persian context of Underneath the Bough was an attempt to invoke an ‘ars erotica’ in opposition to the ‘scientia sexualis’ operative in their own time. We can see the beginnings of this strategy in Long Ago, where the ancient Greek context offers a multiplicity of desire rather than the mystification of desire found in ancient Persia. Both contexts work against the categorisation of sexology. In the end, the context of Underneath the Bough enables a more thorough detachment: in Long Ago, Bradley and Cooper still seem to be thinking through a balance of the homosexual and heterosexual in Sappho, instead of a rejection of those categories. It is for this reason that it is appropriate to conceive of their opposition to sexology, at this stage in their career, through its own terms. Yet the ancient setting of Long Ago does more than recontextualise Michael Field’s fetishistic desire. The epigraph itself – ‘A great while since, a long, long time ago’ – places history, and its relation to the present, centre stage in the volume. This quotation both locates the present from the position of the ‘now’ of the past (a ‘great while since’ this moment in the past), but it also positions the past in relation to the present (‘a long, long time ago’). In this way it sets up a reciprocal

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dynamic which refuses a temporal hierarchy and which imagines a ‘now’ coterminous with both past and present. The rather archaic contexture of Long Ago – with its vellum cover, its frontispiece reproducing an ancient portrait of Sappho – situates the book itself as part of a ‘now’ which combines ancient and modern. In the preface we see Bradley and Cooper positioning themselves in relation to the deity Aphrodite through Sappho: ‘Devoutly as the fiery-bosomed Greek turned in her anguish to Aphrodite, praying her to accomplish her heart’s desires, I have turned to the one woman who has dared to speak unfalteringly of the fearful mastery of love’. With just two easy steps, Michael Field are connected with the classical poet and the Greek deity. This is not just a link through history, but also one which connects mortal to immortal. Themes of mortality, immortality and memory are strong in this book. Inevitably the ancient Greek universe is structured in large part around a dichotomy between pagan gods and mortals: ‘Tis for his dead girl-love Apollo weaves / His poet’s crown of deathless laurel-leaves’ (poem XXXIX). Poem XI has Phaon musing on the theme of the evils of death and the ‘wise immortals’ who never die. To a large extent the narrative of the book is about the immortalisation of Sappho: her rejection by Phaon becomes, in Bradley and Cooper’s eyes, part of the journey away from the realm of the mortal and inconstant he represents. In this book there are two forces which overcome mortality: desire and poetry. Poem XIV, presumably narrated by Sappho, asks the beautiful Atthis to stay by her side in bed ‘lest I feel the dread, / Atthis, the immanence of death’. In a later poem Sappho announces the immortality she will grant a former lover for his forgetfulness: Oblivion guard thy tomb! Ah, witless sting! They cannot be forgotten whom I sing; For this thy brief forgetfulness of me Thou shalt have everlasting infamy. (poem XXXIX)

This declaration to sing into ‘everlasting infamy’ could just as well be a statement of Bradley and Cooper’s desire for their partnership with Sappho to enable a mutual singing into immortality through Long Ago. Indeed, the ‘leap’ with which the volume ends, which is usually seen to signify doomed femininity, is re-read by Michael Field as a leap into history as well as into aesthetic immortality. The point of this final poem seems to be missed by John Miller Gray (whose review otherwise celebrates the book as ‘one of the most exquisite lyrical productions of the

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latter half of the nineteenth century’). Gray criticises the lyric for ‘forming no satisfying or effectively dramatic culmination to the lyrical sequence which it closes’. He continues: ‘It does not leave one tingling with excitement; it is too quietly meditative in tone; neither in its measure nor in its words does it suggest the moment that preceded the wild flashing of the white foam from the Leucadian cliff ’.76 Yet, the poem seems deliberately to distance itself from the action and excitement of the act, as it is more usually depicted, in order to elevate it to a symbolic moment that indicates another register at work within the volume, and a rather different dimension to Sappho’s flight into the void. In Long Ago, it is this airy arc that puts Sappho and Michael Field within the same book, acknowledging the immortality of the one, hopefully securing the immortality of the other, and connecting both across time: Though in unfathomed seas I sink, Men will remember me, I think, Remember me, my King, as thine; And must I take a shape divine As thine immortal, let me be A dumb sea-bird with breast love-free, And feel the waves fall over me.

Bradley and Cooper use Sappho’s leap as a metaphor for the engagement between past and present that structures Michael Field’s aesthetic. They perform a mirroring passionate leap back into history in order to conjoin with Sappho. This is the temporal paradox to which I will keep returning within Michael Field’s work. It is this attempt to combine diachronic (time-bound, chronological) narratives, with a synchronic moment of union that transcends this structure, that is fundamental to this attempt to write with the ancient poet. Her distance from the late nineteenth century (and its sexological context) is as crucial to Bradley and Cooper’s attempt to write with her as is the synchronic historical proximity they imagine through her leap at the end of the volume. It is no accident that desire, song and death, the combined themes of Sappho’s leap, are also the chief elements structuring Michael Field’s engagement with history.

chapter 3

Sight and Song: Botticelli and ekphrastic paradox

Michael Field’s next volume is also constructed around a fetish, of sorts, for Sight and Song is fuelled by a desire to produce poems which ‘translate’ paintings into words. Ekphrasis is itself an attempt to have mutually incompatible things simultaneously: to allow the poem to claim the static aspects of representation unique to the visual arts, but to do this through the dynamic nature of language. It is this paradox which Michael Field courts in the poems that make up Sight and Song.1 At some level this paradox, like that seen in Long Ago, is founded on a Tiresian ambivalence between the genders. G. E. Lessing’s influential study Laokoo¨n gives us a system of oppositions between poetry and painting that subtly encodes a gender split.2 Influenced by Burke’s essay on the sublime and the beautiful, Lessing believes paintings pleasure the eye in the way that women do, while poetry is a manly art of sublime eloquence.3 Given that Lessing’s own father wrote a Latin thesis titled ‘de non commutando sexus habitu’ – ‘on the impropriety [ . . . ] of women wearing men’s clothes and men women’s’ – it is difficult to keep issues of gender separate from these issues of artistic form.4 The ekphrastic project in Sight and Song is perhaps implicitly another statement of Bradley and Cooper’s refusal to commit when faced with such a dichotomy. However, I suggest that gender is not the primary concern of Sight and Song and an exploration of its ekphrastic endeavour will take us away from such issues, and away from the existing scholarship. Two paradoxes structure my chapter: that of ekphrastic agency, and that negotiation of temporal and spatial modes central to ekphrasis. Exploring the volume through the extremely important, yet neglected, poems based on pictures by Botticelli enables me to present it in a radically new light. Sight and Song was published in 1892 (by Elkin Mathews and John Lane at The Bodley Head). Describing it to John Miller Gray, Bradley 66

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writes, ‘Sight & Song will be a wee book – like one of Verlaine’s. Do not expect much. It’s not another Long Ago. It will interest you; & it is new’.5 The poems for this volume were written in the two years preceding its publication as Bradley and Cooper toured Europe’s major art galleries, and some poems were published in journals before appearing in the collection. A preface explains the book’s theoretical framework and then each of the thirty-one poems is named after the painting it seeks to reproduce for the reader.6 Heavily influenced by Pater, the volume is dominated by Renaissance paintings, with artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli and Giorgione linking the poems to Pater’s prose renditions in The Renaissance and Imaginary Portraits. The production of this book is more intimately tied to Michael Field’s diaries than most, because it is here that we see the women’s notes on paintings, made soon after the visit to the gallery if not in the galleries themselves, gradually metamorphose into the published poems. The diary’s dual, and interlinked, function as both travel journal and notebook for the poems is very clearly demonstrated in the period of writing Sight and Song. The process often involved an initial, quite prosaic, description of the painting which seems both an aide-me´moire and an initial attempt to pick out the interesting, and poetical, features of the painting. Bradley and Cooper return to this description later in the diary and begin to draft a poem from it, picking up some of its key terms. Redrafts of this fragment will often appear later in the diary, and often a fair copy is also to be found there. One can follow this process in a particularly revealing manner in relation to their study of Botticelli. The first proper description of Botticelli’s La Primavera is as follows: Under an orange-grove perfect with fruits, flowers & dark leaves. Mercury to the left is a magnificent figure with the weight thrown on the hip & girt with a rose-red cloak. Behind him the Graces – their limbs in a maze of muslin, their auburn hair coils & rolls & ripples, & their joined arms are upward & downward links in a circle of charm. Venus, in white, and carmine cloak, is depressing in front of her olive-bower. But Spring is a debonnair [sic] vision, pranked with buds, her girdle a flat [?]pleached rose-bough with ordered wildroses – her skirt is full of roses; the edges of her garments turned back as if by little fantastic gusts about her feet. Her hair is wreathed lightly; her neck has a [?]lieary wreath; the embroidery of her dress is the [?] of flower time in the world; her smiles are innocently treacherous; her eyes full of incalculable humour; her hair short but newly-fledged; her cheeks have a gay dreamfulness.7

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Here Venus is dismissed as ‘depressing’ and Flora draws most of their attention. Later on in the same volume, we can find a fuller treatment of Flora written up from the notes quoted above: The whimsicalness of Spring. How she is exquisitely pranked! [ . . . .] Pettish, strong eye-brows, slip-shod hair in wh. the flowers are stuck like brooches, & about the mouth a coy coquettishness; the whole figure through extremest fantasy trim & alert. For in the spring there is a daintiness of [?] & unsoiled leaf: the vagrancy of the fold, & errant & expansion of pattern on the robe mean the dodging way things have of growing & curling aside & making themselves intricate for very happiness.8

Yet all this work on Flora comes to nothing, as it is Venus who is the centre of the poem they eventually publish (‘Spring’ (pp. 22–6)). Moreover, Sight and Song contains another poetic translation of this painting titled simply ‘The Figure of Venus in ‘‘Spring’’ ’ (pp. 85–6). (Indeed, the two other poems in the volume inspired by Botticelli also feature Venus as the central protagonist: ‘Venus and Mars’ and the ‘Birth of Venus’ (pp. 42–6, pp. 13–15).) At some stage Bradley and Cooper’s attention switched from Flora to Venus. In the course of this chapter I will show why Venus, although not the figure who first caught their eye, became so important for the women’s project. For the moment it is enough to illustrate the process of growing intellectual engagement with the paintings which is apparent in the diaries. The term ‘ekphrasis’ is not used by Bradley and Cooper or by their contemporaries who engage in such pictorial translation, but this does not mean they didn’t see themselves as part of such a tradition. Its contemporary meaning, restricting its scope to descriptions of objets d’art, was a development only from the mid-twentieth century onwards. According to Webb, the term was being recovered in the middle of the nineteenth century when, in 1867, Friedrich Matz published a Latin treatise, De Philostratorum in describendis imaginibus fide.9 The term ‘ekphrasis’ occurs only a few times but this does seem to mark the use of the term as a special kind of description of art objects. The project was continued in the 1880s by two Frenchmen – E. Bertrand and A. Bougot – and gradually, culminating in the mid-twentieth century, the term came to be associated with the specific practice we now know as ekphrasis.10 The idea of ekphrasis, then, was important to the cultural development of the fin de sie`cle, even if the term had yet to gain prominence. This can be seen in the number of Michael Field’s colleagues who drew on the idea: not only Pater, but also Wilde (in the strange parody of ekphrasis in

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The Picture of Dorian Gray), D. G. Rossetti (in his Ballads and Sonnets, 1881) and Charles Ricketts (in The Prado and its Masterpieces, 1903; Titian, 1910; Pages on Art, 1913). Georgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists was also influential for Michael Field’s idea of an ‘art book’ which contains no illustrations of the pictures it describes, and it is referred to several times by Pater in The Renaissance. Bradley and Cooper were certainly aware of working within this tradition when they wrote Sight and Song and it is within this tradition that I situate them. The terms of ekphrasis are still to a large extent determined by Lessing’s work on painting and poetry. Ekphrasis is not just any description of an art work in language, but an attempt to create a new mode of representation which fuses the distinctive qualities of painting and language. For Lessing, these two modes of representation have completely different remits: painting is an art of spatial organisation, while language is distinguished by temporal organisation and action across time. This fundamental difference in artistic mode has, Lessing believes, a consequence (albeit less fundamental) for possibilities for depiction within the two art forms. Because painting is a medium defined by spatial organisation it is more suited to representing visual impressions at a single moment in time. Literature, on the other hand, is, because of its linguistic medium, more appropriate for depicting actions and events across time. Lessing believed that literature has the greatest potential, but painting can achieve a unity and coherence which is not possible in literature. It is for this reason that a combination of the two modes was such an attractive proposition. Yet, for Lessing, however far one tries to achieve such a combination in terms of content, it will never be possible to discover an ekphrastic mode of depiction. In other words, any attempt at ekphrasis will turn out to be either literature or painting, but it will never form that elusive intermediate mode of representation. It is within this dialectical framework that Sight and Song belongs. The preface to Michael Field’s volume is a manifesto of its artistic ambition: The aim of this little volume is, as far as may be, to translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves; to express not so much what these pictures are to the poet, but rather what poetry they objectively incarnate. Such an attempt demands patient, continuous sight as pure as the gazer can refine it of theory, fancies, or his mere subjective enjoyment. ‘Il faut, par un effort d’esprit, se transporter dans les personnages et non les attirer a` soi.’ For personnages substitute peintures, and this sentence from Gustave

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Flaubert’s ‘Correspondence’ resumes the method of art-study from which these poems arose. Not even ‘le grand Gustave’ could ultimately illude [sic] himself as a formative power in his work – not after the pain of a lifetime directed to no other end. Yet the effort to see things from their own centre, by suppressing the habitual centralisation of the visible in ourselves, is a process by which we eliminate our idiosyncrasies and obtain an impression clearer, less passive, more intimate. When such effort has been made, honestly and with persistence, even then the inevitable force of individuality must still have play and a temperament mould the purified impression: ‘When your eyes have done their part, Thought must length it in the heart.’

Although it is not immediately obvious, Bradley and Cooper’s use of the term ‘translation’ is one which connects them with the idea of ekphrasis as a combination of the qualities of two modes of representation (‘translation’ is a term that appears frequently in ekphrastic writing and writing on ekphrasis).11 ‘Translation’ might be thought to involve seeing the content of one thing through the formal features of another . Yet this translating of one thing into another is not the combination of modes I take ekphrasis to aspire to, and is not, I will argue, what Michael Field has in mind. In her innovative essay on Sight and Song, Ana Parejo Vadillo suggested that we should interpret Michael Field’s use of the word ‘translation’ through Walter Benjamin’s ideas of translation as ‘transparency’.12 I propose a rather different route, through a theoretical source slightly closer to home, and suggest instead ‘synaesthesia’. No doubt Bradley and Cooper were aware of Pater’s discourse on translation in ‘The School of Giorgione’ and used the term with full knowledge of the dangers Pater outlines here: It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting – all the various products of art – as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in painting; of sound, in music; of rhythmical words, in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle – that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind – is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism. For, as art addresses not pure sense, still less the pure intellect, but the ‘imaginative reason’ through the senses, there are differences of

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kind in aesthetic beauty, corresponding to the differences in kind of the gifts of sense themselves. Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reaching the imagination, its own special responsibilities to its material.13

Pater opposes precisely the separation of mode and content that the act of translation seems to imply. Yet it is immediately clear, however, that Sight and Song also disdains this sub-ekphrastic experiment by stating its aim to translate not just a ‘fixed quantity of imaginative thought’, separated from its essentially artistic qualities of colour and line, but by translating into verse ‘what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves; [ . . . ] what poetry they objectively incarnate’. Bradley and Cooper enter into the paradox of ekphrasis through their desire to translate not just content, but also the qualities of the mode of artistic representation (its expressive qualities), into their verse. If we think of the project of translation within Sight and Song as one more akin to synaesthesia, we find a process which is not dependent on abstracting content from form in order to represent it within another mode, but a more complete apprehension of something designed for one sense through another sensory channel. Cooper herself invokes this synaesthetic metamorphosis when she writes in a letter, on seeing ‘L’Indiffe´rent’ published in The Academy, that it is a triumph of style: ‘no difficulty about style there – the impression crystallized into words as if by effortless natural laws. Such a thing has not happened to me lyrically since I wrote ‘‘a calm in the flitting sky’’’.14 This idea of an impression crystallising effortlessly is certainly not simply the process of translating content between two formal structures against which Pater warns. Yet, the question remains: how were Bradley and Cooper to retain the visual impression of the picture in their poem? This problem of ekphrastic translation can be seen through two paradoxes in Sight and Song. One is moulded around the troublesome relationship between poet and painting, where the poet tries to reconcile his or her powerful position as the filter for the painting with his desire to be subordinate to it. In other words, the poet wants the painting to be present through the very poem that inevitably obscures it. The other issue is the negotiation of a combination of two very different modes of representation, one of which operates primarily in spatial dimensions, the other primarily in time. The former concern has so far dominated critical appreciations of Sight and Song, which situate the question of agency in relation to gender politics. The latter has not yet been studied at all. I will

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both reconfigure the former debate - through a study of the neglected Botticelli poems - and instigate a new reading of the volume in relation to the latter, connecting it with Michael Field’s broader concerns with time and history. ekphrastic agency In important papers, Ana Parejo Vadillo, Krista Lysack, Julia Saville, Jill Ehnenn and Hilary Fraser focus on the gendered subject and object positioning encoded within Sight and Song: the relationship between poet and the painting.15 These readings, although each individuated by astute and compelling arguments, are unified by a concern with the male gaze, the positioning of the woman critic/poet within a male canon of aestheticians and connoisseurs, and Bradley and Cooper’s re-reading of the female form in western art. Yet, while my work is informed by these valuable debates, I want to leave aside, for the moment, these issues of gender and offer a rather different idea of the significance of agency within the book and its ekphrastic preoccupations. As Saville acknowledges, Sight and Song is difficult to assimilate into a tradition of fin-de-sie`cle feminist poetry,16 and there are important aspects of the volume that are not discussed when a concern with gender dynamics guides our reading. Indeed, it is striking that, at their core, the above essays all circle around a fairly small group of poems from Sight and Song, and it is interesting to note what does not lend itself to this kind of analysis. In Michael Field’s collection there are four poems devoted to works by Botticelli, a figure matched only by Correggio and an indication of his centrality to Bradley and Cooper’s project. Yet Botticelli currently has a reputation for prissiness, and for graceful, demure females surrounded by flowers, who stand little chance of recuperation as strong sexual subjects. Ehnenn and Lysack both read Michael Field’s depiction of the relationship between Flora and Venus in the ‘The Birth of Venus’ as a celebration of a moment outside of normative heterosexuality (and Ehnenn takes this reading over into the poem on La Primavera also), but otherwise references to Botticelli are brief.17 Yet the artist had a very particular history and meaning for the nineteenth century which makes him a key to the volume as a whole. In his essay on Botticelli in The Renaissance, Pater outlines the idea of a painter whose art is almost ekphrastic itself: ‘He is before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm of story and sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of line and colour, the medium of

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abstract painting’.18 Pater links this quality in Botticelli’s art to the artist’s study, and illustration, of Dante. In Pater’s tale, Botticelli’s art is frequently bound up with poetry in one way or another. His story of the condemned portrait of Matteo Palmieri, which was suspected of embodying the ‘wayward dream’ of Palmieri’s ‘La Citta di Vita’, is a case in point. No other painter dealt with by Pater plays such a role in combining literary and visual arts: no wonder Botticelli’s pictures populate Sight and Song in such large number. If the aim was to uncover the poetry inherent in the picture, then where better to begin than with a painter who self-consciously courts a poetic dimension in his work? John Addington Symonds also stresses that Botticelli was ‘a true poet within the limits of a certain sphere. We have to seek his parallel among the verse-writers rather than the artists of his day’.19 Botticelli was a recent discovery in the art world when Pater wrote ‘Sandro Botticelli’, and he feels the need to justify his interest: ‘besides those great men, there is a certain number of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; and these too have their place in general culture’.20 For Pater, Botticelli captures something particularly relevant to the fin de sie`cle, and it seems no coincidence that the artist’s work was revived at this time.21 Early nineteenth-century critics had not been favourable to Botticelli. Anna Jameson left the most positive testimony, writing that Botticelli’s Madonna del Magnificat contained ‘absolutely no beauty of feature, either in the Madonna, or the Child, or the angels, yet every face is full of dignity and character’.22 However, when Crowe and Cavalcaselle wrote their New History of Painting in Italy (1864–6), they devoted an entire chapter to him.23 This book brought Botticelli to the attention of the art-loving world but it did little to celebrate his work. Not long after, Swinburne, back from his time in the Uffizi, enthused over Botticelli’s drawings (if not his paintings) in his essay ‘Notes on Designs of the Old Masters in Florence’. Swinburne established the classic fin-de-sie`cle interpretation of the paintings which focused on their strange colouring and their pallor. Swinburne criticises Botticelli’s ‘lean and fleshless beauty, worn down it seems by some sickness or natural trouble rather than by ascetic or artificial sorrow’, but La Primavera is ‘beautiful for all its quaintness, pallor, and deformities’.24 In fact, for the Decadents, the picture was beautiful because of these features. As these ‘flaws’ became virtues, the painter was finally back in vogue. Pater’s essay on Botticelli - published in the Fortnightly Review (August 1870) and reprinted in The Renaissance (1873) – is the first serious attempt

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to identify him as an iconic trope of the fin de sie`cle, and, like Swinburne, Pater also dwells on the pallor and gloom of the joyous La Primavera. Botticelli is a painter who perfectly combines the pagan and the Christian in a manner which so characterised the Renaissance for writers such as Pater. The aesthetes found in this amalgamation a motif of their own obsession with beauty and ennui, giving rise to satirical references to Botticelli in the Punch cartoons of the 1880s. John Addington Symonds finds in Botticelli ‘almost unique value as representing the interminglement of antique and modern fancy at a moment of transition, as embodying in some of his pictures the subtlest thought and feeling of men for whom the classic myths were beginning to live once more’.25 D. G. Rossetti bought an early portrait by Botticelli26 and wrote an ekphrastic sonnet about one of his paintings in Ballads and Sonnets, published in 1881. Edward Burne-Jones saw not only the paintings, but also the reproductions of Botticelli’s designs to Dante and, as many critics have noticed, absorbed much from the artist, including his ‘poetical spirit’.27 With the notable exception of Ruskin, there was a consensus about what Botticelli meant for the fin de sie`cle. This was a discourse into which Bradley and Cooper plunged headlong with their 1892 volume, and its four Botticelli poems. A consideration of the role of Botticelli in Sight and Song adds a new dimension to our thinking about the issues of agency raised so adroitly by those critics cited above. Vadillo and Saville, in particular, both identified Sight and Song as engaged in a struggle between objective and subjective responses to painting: between letting the painting speak for itself and having it eclipsed by the dominating subjectivity of the critic/poet who speaks for it. Vadillo, for example, sees in Sight and Song a ‘two-phased aesthetic’ - an objective vision followed by the necessity of acknowledging the subjectivity of the individual vision.28 Vadillo’s argument is that Michael Field’s theory of vision allows ‘the autonomy of both the art object and of its gazer’, acknowledging other subjectivities in a way she feels Pater doesn’t.29 This is particularly important for Vadillo in conferring sexual agency on the classical female nude of the western tradition. Julia Saville also focuses on the relationship between the poet and the painting, but she sees Michael Field’s objectivity (something achieved through, and in spite of, a personal subjective vision) as indebted to Pater’s thought (she cites here Pater’s lecture of 1890, attended by Bradley and Cooper).30 I find the pull between subjective and objective itself a thoroughly Paterian response, and see that bipartite aesthetic as a development of

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Pater’s argument in the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, rather than an alternative to it. The structure of Pater’s essay might itself be described as ‘two-phase,’ as it struggles to find an accommodation between the objectivity he feels is the mark of true vision and the subjectivity which he sees as constituent of modernity and with which he struggles.31 When Bradley and Cooper quote Flaubert in their preface, they are echoing Pater’s review of Correspondance de Gustave Flaubert in which he writes: Impersonality in art, the literary ideal of Gustave Flaubert, is perhaps no more possible than realism. The artist will be felt; his subjectivity must and will colour the incidents, as his very bodily eye selects the aspects of things.32

That the phrasing in Michael Field’s preface so closely follows Pater’s words reveals this direct influence. Both are aspiring to that impersonality while recognising that there will always be an associated tussle with subjectivity. Yet in Michael Field’s poem ‘Spring’, this quandary is resolved by an identification of the poet – the viewer – with the central figure of the painting: Venus. By identifying the viewer’s subjectivity with that of Venus, the partiality of the account becomes not the viewer’s, but Venus’s. The painting is presented as a drama which is directed by its central character rather than by the spectator. Bradley and Cooper’s dramatic interests feed into their poetic work in many ways, but nowhere are they more apparent, methodologically, than in their engagement with these pictures. The combining of two modes in ekphrastic representation is realised in this poem by the addition of a third: drama enables the transition between language and visual spectacle. Bradley and Cooper declare as much in their quotation from Flaubert in the preface, where they state their methodology as one in which it is necessary to inhabit the characters – for which they quickly substitute ‘peintures’ – rather than viewing them from outside. However, the word ‘personnages’ is quite the right one in many ways. Transporting themselves into Venus within the paintings is one way they reconcile the ‘inevitable force of individuality’ with the objectivity they crave. The identification with Venus in this poem is Bradley and Cooper’s way of seeing things ‘from their own centre’ and suppressing ‘the habitual centralisation of the visible in ourselves’. ‘Spring’ begins with Venus literally framing the poem: the first three, long lines, with their calm iambic pentameter, introduce the painting through Venus’s sadness which is contrasted with the ‘delicious tempest’ of the rest of the scene. The reader thus sees the gaiety through Venus’s

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eyes. This inverts the experience one might, arguably, have of first viewing the painting, where the jollity of the scene as a whole is the first thing to draw one’s attention and the sadness of Venus is next noticed as a discordant note. Privileging Venus’s viewpoint yields a different experience of the picture. The first stanza is made up of five lines of calm iambic pentameter interrupted by nineteen jaunty lines of seven syllables each, where the stress is reversed into trochaic feet. The sedate iambic pentameter frames the fast-paced middle section and there is rather a jolt between the two meters as the urgent initial stress of the shorter lines brings the reader, lulled by the iambs, up short. The move from the first three iambic lines to the next nineteen takes us away from calm Venus and gives us a rapid tour of the scene on the right-hand side of the painting. The stanza comes to rest, in its final two iambic lines, on Flora. The calmer meter seems to signify the consciousness, or ‘voice’ of Venus, whose viewpoint we first take in this stanza. The fast trochaic lines, on the other hand, are like mediating stage directions which describe to the reader what else is in the scene. The next stanza is made up of sixteen lines of blank verse and begins, again, through Venus’s eyes, associating Venus’s consciousness with the iambic pentameter: ‘These riot by the left side of the queen; / Before her face another group is seen’. My suggestion that we have just been ‘shown’ the events on the right-hand side of Venus is quickly corrected. We are urged to experience the painting not from outside the scene (as we inevitably would were we to view it) but to experience it, dramatically, from the position of the central character: and what is to the picture viewer’s right is to Venus’s left. These two lines intertwine Venus’s point of view with that of someone outside the picture. Venus is not present in the first person and we are not asked to believe she is speaking, but we are asked to see the scene from her viewpoint. This second stanza describes the Graces but ends back again with Venus: ‘And does it touch their Deity with ruth / That they must fade when Eros speeds his dart? / Is this the grief and forethought of her heart?’ Again, Bradley and Cooper don’t entirely identify with Venus, they don’t speak as her, but they do try to understand the picture from her perspective. The third stanza mirrors the form of the first and begins with Venus’s sorrow - ‘For she is sad’ - and it goes on to explore the presentiment of sorrow in the picture. The final stanza is another of blank verse and deals with the tone of the scene more generally. It ends with ‘Venus looking on, / Beholds the mead with all the dancers gone’, as if looking at the scene from Venus’s perspective involves seeing also her own specific concerns and worries for the future.

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Like dramatic stage directions, this poem tries to bridge the gap between text and the visual world by imaginatively reconstructing the scene from a viewpoint within the scene itself: we see it through the eyes of the central protagonist whose presence organises the space around her. This is surely what Bradley and Cooper meant when they wrote in the preface about their ‘effort[s] to see things from their own centre’. This strategy avoids the confrontation between the gaze of the object and the gaze of the subject that Vadillo rightly traces, in relation to analysis of other poems, in the ‘Visual Aesthetics’ section of her paper: the gaze of both object and subject unite in this dramatic vivification of the scene of the painting. This dramatic solution to the problem of subjectivity can also be seen in the ekphrasis of Charles Ricketts. Ricketts even talks about the ‘stage-craft’ of a painting, and in his writings he assumes the role of director.33 Ricketts’s ekphrastic works came over a decade after Michael Field’s and he seems to have been profoundly influenced by Sight and Song.34 In Ricketts’s work on Titian’s Bacchanal we can see again how an assertion of identity is forged between the critic and the object as the painting is dramatised from the inside.35 David Peters Corbett’s analysis of this passage shows how the sleeping Bacchante represents the passive spectator of the painting. Both Bacchante and critic are inert vehicles which channel the essential qualities of the painting into the text. This puts the spectator in the role of impassive mediator and so seems to avoid the potential dangers of his interfering subjectivity. As Corbett says, ‘the passage asserts the opposite of what it enacts, the denial rather than the assertion of the interpreting personality’.36 Ricketts seems to assert the interpreting personality but denies it through this identification with the subject of the painting. Both Michael Field and then Ricketts avoid the potentially overwhelming power of interpretation of the ekphrastic poet by identifying the poet with the central figure in the painting. This technique has some resonance with Vernon Lee’s contemporaneous theories of empathy. Bradley and Cooper may not have wanted to be associated with her, but they knew her, and her work, very well.37 ‘Empathy’ is sometimes thought to be a purely subjectivist response to art, more concerned with the sensitive ego of the sensitive soul than about the art work itself, and it is easy to see why Lee and Kit Anstruther-Thomson’s bizarre gallery dramas may be thought to be somewhat egocentric.38 Lee’s monitoring of Anstruther-Thomson’s physical and physiological response to a piece of art as a way of understanding the contents of the gallery conjures up strange spectacles. However, in her chapter on empathy in The Beautiful,

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Lee makes it quite clear that empathy is engaged with the same struggle between the objective and the subjective (the painting and the viewer) which occupies both Pater and Michael Field. An appeal to empathy is a way of explaining and resolving this struggle. Lee describes empathy here in relation to the example of being faced with a picture of a mountain: what we are transferring (owing to that tendency to merge the activities of the perceiving subject with the qualities of the perceived object) from ourselves to the looked at shape of the mountain, is not merely the thought of the rising which is really being done by us at that moment, but the thought and emotion, the idea of rising as such which had been accumulating in our mind long before we ever came into the presence of that particular mountain. And it is this complex mental process [ . . . ] which constitutes what, accepting Prof. Titchener’s translation of the German word Einfu¨hlung, I have called Empathy.39

But she warns that it is a misinterpretation to see Empathy as a ‘projection of the ego into the object or shape under observation’. This, she argues, would be incompatible with ‘the fact that Empathy, being only another of those various mergings of the activities of the perceiving subject with the qualities of the perceived object [ . . . ] depends upon a comparative or momentary abeyance of all thought of an ego’.40 That Flaubertian phrase quoted in the preface to Sight and Song is surprisingly similar to Lee’s definition of Empathy: ‘The German word Einfu¨hlung ‘‘feeling into’’ derived from a verb to feel oneself into something (‘‘sich in Etwas ein fu¨hlen’’)’.41 Whether the German for ‘to feel oneself into’ or the French ‘Il faut [ . . . ] se transporter dans les personnages’, this process of translation into English of European ideas is a foundation stone for the process of artistic translation Michael Field achieves in ‘Spring’. The dramatisation of the picture within the poem helps Michael Field avoid the mistake (identified by Pater) of supposing that the different arts were merely translations of the same content - that ‘fixed quantity of imaginative thought’ - into different formal structures. Bradley and Cooper’s more comprehensive ‘synaesthetic’ translation of the expressive qualities of the picture (‘what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves; [ . . . ] what poetry they objectively incarnate’) can begin to be seen in ‘Spring’. In ‘Spring’ the scene is dramatised from the viewpoint of Venus, rather than any other character in the scene, because the poets feel this captures something of the visual experience of the painting which goes beyond mere representation of content-facts. Their reading of the painting is that its scene is presented through the consciousness of its central character: Venus’s sadness literally colours the

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whole painting and is responsible for the cool shades in which such frivolity is depicted. Having their poem literally mediated by Venus’s sadness (in the long iambic lines which frame each stanza), and having the reader guided around the scene from Venus’s viewpoint, enables the poets to recreate poetically the visual experience of seeing the jolly scene through the gloomy colours. The potential abstraction of content which Pater lamented would, in contrast, have consisted in the poet simply, for example, telling the reader that certain objects were coloured with certain dismal hues. What is attempted here is a recreation of the ‘impression’ of the painting in words (using the distinctive poetic resources of the lyric), rather than merely a description of it. This is, indeed, a noble attempt at true ekphrasis. painting time In ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, Mitchell describes the goal of ekphrasis as being that: the mute image be endowed with a voice, or made dynamic and active, or actually come into view, or (conversely) that poetic language might be ‘stilled,’ made iconic, or ‘frozen’ into a static, spatial array – all these aspirations begin to look idolatrous and fetishistic.42

What I’ve just articulated as the dramatisation of Venus (and the inhabiting of her viewpoint on the scene) goes some way towards exploring the endowing of the mute with a voice. But the dynamic Mitchell identifies is really one based on time: how to combine the still moment of the painting with the diachronic nature of language. The dramatisation of the scene in ‘Spring’, described above, operates not only to organise the relationship of viewer/reader and the scene depicted, but also to introduce a temporal dimension to the scene represented. In Michael Field’s poem there is a narrative built up around the painting, as if the scene captured more than a single moment. This introduces the tension upon which the ekphrastic paradox in Sight and Song is founded: how to combine modes of representation which have quite different fundamental properties. Time is at the heart of a general set of differences between the modes of representation of poem and picture: a poem can’t, for example, describe everything in a picture, but it can provide a broader temporal sweep, adding a narrative of events before and after the scene depicted to make up for the lack of richness in detail. Painting’s strength in representing a still moment in time (in all its detail) might be contrasted with poetry’s

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greater ability for narrative. This is why Lessing holds the view that poetry is an essentially temporal art form, while painting is inherently spatial. It is the fusion of these two quite distinct properties that is sought by ekphrasis, but this is also what Lessing and Pater (as the latter showed in the passage on translation quoted earlier) think impossible. The problem of ekphrasis is that a poem can reproduce some sense of abstracted content from a picture, but that the true painterly qualities of the painting lie in aspects of the mode of representation which can’t be taken over into the poem. I have just shown how Bradley and Cooper make a plausible attempt to address this problem when they ‘translate’ colours into formal properties of the poem. This seems to engage directly with Pater’s worries, and shows a desire to move beyond the representation in the poem of mere content-facts of the painting. However the temporal dimension of this translation requires more exploration if we are to meet Lessing’s concerns. The point of ekphrastic poems is that they bring something of the perfect, still, moment of art into a world of language governed by temporality. In Jonathan Freedman’s words, they seem ‘to create timeless icons in the very medium that seems bound most irrevocably to time’.43 The impossible combination of timelessness and temporality is the paradoxical key to ekphrasis. This, I suggest, is the reason Botticelli’s works so interested Bradley and Cooper. I have already pointed out that Botticelli’s paintings were, for the cluster of late Victorians who revived interest in him, iconic representations of that combining of the pagan and the Christian in one synchronic moment which was what made the Renaissance, more generally, so fascinating to them. The Christian handling of pagan subjects such as Venus was indicative of that paradoxical reconciliation.44 For Pater, this is the moment at which pagan body and Christian soul come together to create a satisfying whole. His reading of the Mona Lisa is the embodiment of this moment, and Bradley and Cooper take their cue from Pater in their ‘Gioconda’. But it is the Botticelli paintings of pagan subjects which most completely represent this union for the aesthetes (note that Bradley and Cooper don’t include any of Botticelli’s Christian paintings in Sight and Song). H. W. Janson notes that Botticelli’s Birth of Venus represents the first major image since Roman times of the nude goddess figure positioned in the familiar pose derived from classical statues of Venus.45 The Neoplatonic philosophers of the fifteenth century allowed this coming together of classical mythology and Christianity by way of appeal to the continuous spiritual circuit which linked all revelation. Hence the Neoplatonists could invoke the nude Venus

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interchangeably with the Virgin Mary, ‘as the source of ‘‘divine love’’ ’.46 Janson points out that, once we recognise this interchange, we notice that the Birth of Venus has two wind gods who look much like angels, and that the figure of Spring welcoming Venus refers to conventional postures of St John and the Saviour in artistic renditions of the baptism of Christ.47 Even Ruskin recognised Botticelli as the only Italian artist who ‘understood the thoughts of Heathens and Christians equally, and could in a measure paint both Aphrodite and the Madonna’.48 But, while Ruskin saw this as a sullying of the Christianity of the Middle Ages, Pater saw in it a vivifying mingling of cultures.49 By 1892 Bradley and Cooper were definitely taking their lead in these matters from Pater rather than Ruskin. In his essay in The Renaissance, Pater writes of Botticelli’s interest in men and women, in their mixed and uncertain condition [ . . . .] conveying into his work somewhat more than is usual of the true complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so forcible a realist.50

That mixed condition is the combination of pagan and Christian which seemed so inescapable for the aesthetes. He describes Botticelli’s Birth of Venus as a classical subject sitting in a landscape of ‘grotesque emblems of the middle age’, ‘powdered all over in a Gothic manner with a quaint conceit of daisies’.51 Botticelli’s significance for the late Victorians was precisely focused around theories of time and history. Botticelli’s paintings encode not the still moment which Lessing thought was the prerogative of visual art, but a synchronic moment (by which I mean two temporally distinct moments represented as simultaneous within the scene of the picture). This creates very different parameters for the ekphrastic project and it is this which provides a unique element in Sight and Song. In ‘Spring,’ Bradley and Cooper foreground this notion of the existence of a temporal synchronicity within the painting. For example, the flowers in the Birth of Venus that Pater described as characteristically ‘powdered all over in a Gothic manner’ are here ‘brooches in [Flora’s] hair’, again stressing the effect of the medieval tapestry which seems to overlay the painting of the classical subject. In general, however, Bradley and Cooper do not choose to focus on the combination of pagan and Christian moments. They stress instead a much more immediate temporal palimpsest which combines present and future rather than past and present. Bradley and Cooper present the picture as one which encodes a frozen moment, but also the story of the subsequent moment.

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I have already discussed how Bradley and Cooper see the gloomy, cold colours in the picture as representing the filtering consciousness of the melancholy Venus, who acts as the mediator of the picture as well as a figure within it. The real significance of Venus for Bradley and Cooper is that her sadness is a foreshadowing of the future in the present moment of the painting. Venus is sad within a scene of such jollity because she can see into the future to the moment when it all ends. The scene itself is poised, by Botticelli, just before a turning point. Stanza three alerts us to the fact that change is imminent: Venus’s son, Cupid, is in the process of shooting ‘his childish flame to mar / Those without defect, who are / Yet unspent and cold with peace’, and Hermes is captured at the moment of plucking a ripe orange. Bradley and Cooper note that Hermes himself, in his role as ‘guide of ghosts’, brings an echo of death to the scene as surely as does the pallor of the chill light which represents Venus’s fear. Bradley and Cooper understand Venus as the figure who clearly foresees the results of these actions, and who brings the following moment into the picture through her ‘dread’. The final stanza achieves this very directly on a linguistic level. The first few lines contain images which sum up the contradictions inherent in a picture that contains the demise of the moment as well as the moment itself: the ‘woods are bleak’ even though ‘flowers have sudden birth’; ‘love is cruel’; and God brings shadows to the earth. The poems ends with that line which, I claim, is not an imaginative narrative extrapolation of the painting by the poets, but a representation of what is already there: ‘Alas, / At play together, through the speckled grass / Trip Youth and April: Venus, looking on, / Beholds the mead with all the dancers gone’. The preface to Sight and Song promises only to represent in the poem what is already there in the painting. Clearly what is described in this line is not actually depicted within the painting, but it is implicitly represented – through Venus’s expression and the pause in her moment of benediction, as well as through the colouring and atmosphere – in order to enable Botticelli to import a sense of the consequences of the current actions. Crucially, this narrative of mutation and decay is not something Bradley and Cooper have imaginatively added to the picture – it is not an addition of a narrative element which poetry can bring to painting but which painting cannot offer itself. However, this claim rests on the possibility of the painting itself representing a synchronic moment.52 Such simultaneity in visual representation, even if not recognised by the likes of Lessing, is not philosophically incoherent.53 It can be described as a temporal collage. Botticelli is a painter to whom the idea of collage is

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particularly appropriate because the strong outline to his figures takes away an impression of depth in the painting and gives objects a ‘cut out and stuck on’ quality (hence the ‘brooches’ in Flora’s hair). This aspect of the picture allows for the idea that it is fragmented into pieces which don’t necessarily have a common origin. This in turn allows for the idea that some aspects of the painting may belong to a different temporal moment than others. My claim is that Michael Field recognise in the Botticelli painting a potential within the visual arts which outstrips Lessing’s account of painting as a mode of representation with a limited engagement with the temporal. Bradley and Cooper were not the only writers creating ekphrastic works inspired by Botticelli. Botticelli’s new-found popularity made him the topic of many poems.54 Works as slight as Ernest Radford’s ‘Its not Botticelli, oh no!’ - a short spoof on the problems of attribution touching on the names of the founders of the Botticelli revival - marked that Punch moment.55 But the only poem to rival Michael Field’s exploration of Botticelli is Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘For Spring by Sandro Botticelli’: What masque of what old wind-withered New-Year Honours this Lady? Flora, wanton-eyed For birth, and with all flowrets prankt and pied: Aurora, Zephyrus, with mutual cheer Of clasp and kiss: the Graces circling near, ’Neath bower-linked arch of white arms glorified: And with those feathered feet which hovering glide O’er Spring’s brief bloom, Hermes the harbinger. Birth-bare, not death-bare yet, the young stems stand, This Lady’s temple-columns: o’er her head Love wings his shaft. What mystery here is read Of homage or of hope? But how command Dead Springs to answer? And how question here These mummers of that wind-withered New-Year?56

This poem, like Rossetti’s other ekphrastic pieces, seems to present this painting as the perfectly stilled moment. It is a moment on the verge of transition, to be sure (this is ‘Spring’s brief bloom’ and ‘death’ is sure to follow ‘birth’; it is a fragile ‘wind-withered interlude of joy’), but it is clear that Rossetti does not perceive in this picture the multiple temporal perspective that Michael Field discovers. This poem is as much the still interlude as Michael Field’s is the drama. There is a sense of the brevity of the moment depicted, but no sense of its demise being present within the

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represented scene. In his ‘The Poetics of Ekphrasis’, John Hollander gives a persuasive account of Rossetti’s ekphrastic project, with a long analysis of a Giorgione sonnet.57 Here he reads Rossetti’s sonnet through Pater’s understanding of the pictorial ‘still moment’ as a musical interval, or a silent gap.58 Rossetti, Hollander notes, ‘moves to the heart of the pictorial matter here by pointing to the momentary suspension – Pater’s ‘‘musical interval’’ [ . . . .] That moment of pause [ . . . ] is the relation between spots of time and the clear expanse of eternity named in the poem’s last line’.59 This stillness is also powerfully conveyed by Rossetti’s sonnet on Flora. The scene is a far distant world from the poet, with secrets and mysteries it will not disclose. The world which Michael Field entered, and saw through the eyes of Venus, is a closed secret to Rossetti. For Rossetti the sonnet begins with a question about the meaning of the painting and ends with a reiteration of the same question, which affirms the impossibility of even beginning to get in touch with this perfect, crystallised moment in the past. This poem restates the paradox of ekphrasis in which the still moment is supposedly captured by the poem but at the same time remains separate and impenetrable to it. What a different work this is from Michael Field’s, published eleven years later. Bradley and Cooper’s poem – with its connections between past, present, future – places the poem in a web of dynamic relationships which don’t allow this scene to be a crystallised remnant of an unknowable age. We must situate Michael Field within this tradition of ekphrastic writing, alongside the poetic giants of the period, in order to appreciate their intervention. In the midst of this rediscovery of Botticelli, it was Michael Field who truly recognised the painter’s potential for complicating and unsettling the paradox through which ekphrasis held apart painting and poetry whilst ostensibly combining them. Rossetti’s poem, by comparison, gives in a little too easily to the same paradox, asserting the impossibility of the ekphrastic project even while configuring it. Michael Field’s recognition of the existence of the double moment within Botticelli’s picture changes the terms of ekphrasis. Instead of attempting to combine the single still moment of visual art with the narrative nature of poetry, Bradley and Cooper try to reconcile the synchronic mode of the Botticelli painting with the diachronic nature of the lyric genre. This is another version of the familiar temporal paradox around which so much of Michael Field’s work turns, and it should come as no surprise that the women renegotiate the terms of ekphrasis to reflect their desire to combine two incompatible patterns of history. Michael

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Field’s recognition of the dual moment in Botticelli does not in itself resolve the problem of ekphrasis, but rather states the problem in different terms. Ekphrasis, let us remember, is about combining, not the content of the painting and the poem, but the properties of the two distinctive modes of representation - and one of the distinctive features of poetry is that it presents us with items in a specific order that we have to access diachronically. No matter what temporal content a poem represents, it will always exist for the reader as a medium bound to its own time and rhythm. Painting, on the other hand, based around spatial rather than temporal organisation, is not linked to time in the same way and, arguably, can be accessed spontaneously as a whole by the viewer (if only superficially). Painting, as a genre, might have the capacity to represent two different moments simultaneously, through a mode of representation which allows these moments to be apprehended synchronically (seeing one through the other), but this leaves a new problem for Michael Field’s poem. How can it represent the synchronic moment in a genre which is intrinsically bound to temporal movement? What effect does the elapsing time of the poem itself have on our understanding of the dual moment it represents? I noted in my earlier reading of ‘Spring’ that Venus is foregrounded as the framing consciousness of the poem by the way she appears first, and occupies long lines which literally border the stanzas. That recurring frame not only gives high profile to Venus’s filtering consciousness, but also reiterates the future moment of sadness Venus represents within the painting, interspersed with descriptions of the joyful present. Through this alternation of descriptions of the present and future moments depicted within the painting, Bradley and Cooper try to capture the experience of seeing these two moments superimposed one on top of the other. This attempt to trick the poem into representing congruent threads by way of alternation can be seen clearly in the repetitions it contains, from ‘Venus is sad’, at the start of the first stanza, to ‘For she is sad’, at the start of the third stanza. These framing statements are represented in sections of iambic pentameter. Each of these sections has three rhymed lines, measured in pace, with rhymes whose drawn-out syllables slow the pace yet further: ‘powers’, ‘hours’, ‘flowers’ in the first, and ‘near’, ‘drear’ and ‘appear’ in the second. The rest of stanza one and stanza two, which come between these two reprisals, describe the scene around Venus using short lines, with an erratic meter, organised through rhyming couplets, as if to mimic the untutored, but dynamic and graceful, movement of the pagans in the scene. There is a sharp contrast between these two textures,

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which indicates the existence of the two different moments depicted simultaneously by Botticelli (the rapturous present and the sadness of the imminent future moment). But the leap at the start of stanza three back to a reiteration of the statement which opened stanza one is an attempt to create an illusion that no time has passed between the start and the middle of the poem. This is Bradley and Cooper’s strategy for representing, through a diachronic medium, two contrasting moments which occur simultaneously within the painting, and which they want to convey as occurring simultaneously in their poem. Having introduced in the first half of the poem the idea that there are two quite distinct temporal moments represented simultaneously in the picture, they go on, in the second half, to register their combined effect within the scene. Here, Venus is explicitly identified as bringing into the scene the sadness of the future moment, and the final stanza, as I described earlier, combines language which represents the bleak colouring of the picture with positive terms which reflect the hope of spring (for example, ‘love is cruel’). Of course, at a detailed level this is still an alternation of one thing and then the other (positive ‘love’, followed by cruelty) – which is all that is possible in a diachronic medium – but, again, it creates the illusion of simultaneity, so that the scene is described as completely coloured by Venus’s sadness, just as the gloomy colours pervade the whole of Botticelli’s scene, and are inseparable from the characters and action depicted therein. The synthesis apparently achieved within Michael Field’s ‘Spring’ is the perfect, illusory, reconciliation of the mutually exclusive artistic modes of the picture and poem. Yet, like all Michael Field’s paradoxes, this illusion relies on Bradley and Cooper’s lyric ability – it is their ability to mimic the experience of synchronicity through the diachronic medium of the poem which carries the poem. This endeavour to create the ultimate ekphrasis results in a very fine piece of writing. But the poem’s achievements are broader than this. Bradley and Cooper believe that achieving this paradox is somehow intrinsic to the success of the lyric more generally. Indeed, Pater’s definition of ‘aesthetic poetry’ is illuminating here. He believes aestheticist poetry, as opposed to other types of poetry as well as other arts, is distinguished by its formal historicism: its engagement with the questions raised by the act of representing the past within the present, and its concern with differentiating as well as including the past.60 He comments on William Morris’s ‘charming anachronisms’ which belong to ‘a poet, who, while he handles an ancient subject, never becomes an antiquarian, but animates his subject by keeping it always close to himself ’.61

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Significantly, aesthetic poetry is also exceptional in containing the other temporal combination discussed here – that between the present moment and its imminent decay: One characteristic of the pagan spirit the aesthetic poetry has, which is on its surface – the continual suggestion, pensive or passionate, of the shortness of life. This is contrasted with the bloom of the world, and gives new seduction to it – the sense of death and the desire of beauty: the desire of beauty quickened by the sense of death.62

Given this definition of the aestheticist lyric, it is not difficult to see why Botticelli’s art was so striking for Michael Field. Indeed, Pater himself not only recognised the important combination of pagan and Christian motifs in Botticelli’s work, but also the simultaneity between the present and future moment noted by Michael Field. Pater saw that for Botticelli beauty was characteristically in the shade of melancholy and tainted by an awareness of death and decay. By virtue of this he also found a certain logic in what might initially seem to mar the painting – ‘you may think that this quaintness must be incongruous with the subject, and that the colour is cadaverous or at least cold’.63 But he never explicitly identifies this as the combination of the present with a future moment, achieved by the expressive qualities of the painting. There is only one hint in this essay that Pater recognises the combination of future and present as well as past and present within the painting, and this is when he notes that Botticelli’s illustrations are crowded with incident, blending, with a naı¨ve carelessness of pictorial propriety, three phases of the same scene into one plate.64

The talk of three phases seems to imply a recognition of before, present and after in the scene. We now see why Botticelli was, for Pater, the most poetical of painters, ‘blending the charm of story and sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of line and colour, the medium of abstract painting’.65 Botticelli exhibits temporal qualities in his painting which Pater felt were definitive of aestheticist poetry, and for which there was no room in Lessing’s definition of painting. It is this unexpected congruence that ramifies so interestingly in Michael Field’s ekphrasis. What we see in Michael Field’s ekphrasis on the paintings of Botticelli is an attempt to take up the challenge Pater throws down. The combination within Botticelli’s painting of pagan and Christian (the moment

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before and the present), as well as of the moment and its demise (the moment and the following moment), were both noted by Pater. Pater also saw these features as definitive of ‘aesthetic poetry’. Yet Pater did not rise to the challenge of combining Botticelli’s painting and the aestheticist poem because of his doubts, probably rooted in Lessing, about the possibility of translating effectively from one medium into another. We take it, then, that he views his essay on Botticelli as criticism rather than ekphrastic text (even though his critical writing on art leans so far towards primary text that his description of the Mona Lisa was anthologised by Yeats as a free-verse poem). What Pater would not quite let himself do, but what he gestures towards in his essay writing, is completed by Michael Field in these ekphrastic poems on Botticelli. ‘Spring’ is an ekphrastic triumph (as comparison with the Rossetti poem shows), but through its reconfiguration of the terms of the ekphrastic paradox it also engages with the broader challenge of the historicity definitive of Pater’s ‘aesthetic’ poem. This combination of synchronic and diachronic modes of representation was, for Bradley and Cooper, an intrinsic part of successful lyric writing, and they feel their way towards this lyric paradox in many different ways over the course of their poetic career. This formed the core of Long Ago (where Bradley and Cooper both wanted to assert a sense of Sappho’s historical distance across time, whilst at the same time combining with her to write in a moment outside of time), and in Sight and Song the same impetus is played out in its most abstract aesthetic form: as a struggle between the possibilities inherent in different artistic media. The poem itself enacts, on a formal level, that paradoxical combination of extra-temporal simultaneity with its own inevitably temporal linear nature. Given aestheticism’s yearning after the combination of the still moment with awareness of historical flux, it is no wonder that ekphrasis is a particularly significant mode of representation at this time. It is no surprise, either, that the conundrum appealed so directly to Bradley and Cooper. Once Bradley and Cooper have, through a re-reading of Botticelli, reconfigured the central dialectic as one between synchronic and diachronic temporal modes, rather than between the still, single, moment and the diachronic, they can use it to help put into practice in verse their own (and Pater’s) sense of what constitutes the specificity and value of the historically informed aestheticist poem. However, no less meaningful, in broader terms, is the problem of agency raised by ekphrasis with which this chapter began. Mitchell writes that ‘The ambivalence about ekphrasis, then, is grounded in our ambivalence about other people [ . . . .]

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Ekphrastic hope and fear express our anxieties about merging with others’.66 Bradley and Cooper’s success, in Sight and Song, at ekphrastic merging, or empathy as I prefer to term it, was not entirely unconnected with their own skilful negotiation of their subject/object relationship with each other textually. It is this more personal paradox that is crafted out of the women’s dual authorship that provides the conceptual underpinning for their next volume of poetry, and to which I now turn.

chapter 4

Underneath the Bough: dual authorship and lyric song

So they loved as love in twain, Had the essence but in one, Two distincts, division none. Number there in love was slain. Hearts remote, yet not asunder, Distance and no space was seen, ’Twixt this turtle and his queen. But in them it were a wonder. [ . . . .] Property was thus appalled That the self was not the same. Single nature’s double name Neither two nor one was called. (William Shakespeare, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’)1

Published in 1893, Underneath the Bough, like Long Ago, was set within a context of ancient erotic lyricism. The title, and the epigraph, come from The Ruba´iya´t of Omar Khayya´m, placing the volume firmly in the erotic mode. Underneath the Bough seems devoted to Michael Field’s obsession with understanding, and figuring poetically an erotic, and lyrical, congruence between bodies across time and space. These concerns are apparent in the oeuvre before and after this volume, but here Bradley and Cooper take as their central theme the duality of Michael Field’s authorship. This chapter, then, allows me, initially, to introduce Bradley and Cooper’s prose explanations of their duality, as well as the recent critical debate on this issue. In order to expand the remit of that debate, my exploration of the dual authorship will set up a comparison with contemporaneous poets which shows that the dual authorship allows Bradley and Cooper to sidestep some of the problems of subjectivity inherent in the lyric tradition for woman writers. I then argue that Michael Field’s 90

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duality has consequences for our understanding of the lyric more generally, as it invokes an Elizabethan/Jacobean conception of lyric in order to counter the very absence upon which the Victorian lyric appears to be predicated. This argument for a deliberately crafted textual duality within the poetry – and the paradox it harbours – is then tested in relation to a poem from The Wattlefold, which was written by Bradley after Cooper’s death. Finally, I will suggest that even the dual authorship has, at its heart, a puzzle about the relationship between synchronic and diachronic structures, and that we must engage with this central aspect of Michael Field’s poetic in order to seek an explanation for the multiple editions of Underneath the Bough. Omar Khayya´m (from Persia, 1048– 1122), let us remember, was a mathematician as well as an astronomer and poet. He was involved in the project of reforming the calendar, and he measured the length of the year to a surprisingly accurate degree. This rather pivotal role in history, and in the construction of time and the means of measuring time, is no doubt as important to Bradley and Cooper’s invocation of his work as is the, much more commonly recognised, erotic nature of his Ruba´iya´t. As a short coda to this chapter I briefly explore Dedicated, a volume of poems by Cooper, published by Bradley after her death. These poems not only belong temporally to the period between Underneath the Bough and Wild Honey, but they also allow the opportunity to counterbalance the discussion of dual authorship with a brief appraisal of the two women as individual writers with rather different qualities. A poem such as ‘An Invitation’ (pp. 80–2) expresses clearly the importance of literary heritage to Underneath the Bough. This poem is written as an invitation from Bradley to Cooper to ‘Come and sing’ with her. Bradley imagines the two of them together in a sun-filled room, intertwined on the settee. Bradley boasts of having books ‘of long ago / And to-day’ which she will only access if she hears the words through the music of Cooper’s voice. Bradley begins by privileging Elizabethan sources, saying that all the songs she sings well ‘From Elizabethan spring’, but goes on to cite French literature (Flaubert and Verlaine), Latin works (of which Catullus is least painful to Cooper’s weary eyes) and Greek authors (including Cooper’s favourite, Sappho). This poem lays out very clearly the connection between the women’s erotic relationship and the relationship they configure between past and present literature. In Underneath the Bough, this connection is enabled by ‘song’, and, more precisely, ‘singing together’, which encodes a transaction that is both erotic and historical.2

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While Long Ago was situated in the ancient classical world, Underneath the Bough takes two quite different historical locations as its primary frame of reference: both the ancient Persia of the Ruba´iya´t, and the literature of Elizabethan Britain. This eclectic mixture of sources is declared in the titular reference to the Ruba´iya´t, combined with the numerous assertions in the diaries and letters of Michael Field that the volume should be considered a ‘new & beautiful Elizabethan song-book – wh. aspires to treat of Victorian themes in Elizabethan temper’.3 These sources are, I will show, both used by Michael Field to think specifically about song as an erotic, multi-voiced, interaction, in opposition to the solitary lyric voice inherited by Victorian writers. In the women’s drama, the aspiration to the ‘Elizabethan’ needs no gloss (and positive reviews of their dramatic work never fail to praise the ‘Elizabethan quality’),4 but what does this mean in relation to the lyric? Joseph Bristow has argued persuasively for the importance to Underneath the Bough of A. H. Bullen’s Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age.5 In this edition, and other anthologies, Bullen brought back into print neglected Renaissance and Restoration verse by writers such as Thomas Campion, John Dowland and William Byrd. It is clear from Bristow’s analysis that Michael Field’s ‘song-book’ did take inspiration from these lyrical forms.6 Yet there are other Elizabethan influences which were also important. Shakespeare, Bradley and Cooper’s favourite Elizabethan, appears most explicitly in the poem ‘It was deep April, and the morn’ – a poem situated on the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth which marks the occasion when ‘My Love and I took hands and swore, / Against the world, to be / Poets and lovers evermore’ (p. 79). Like ‘An Invitation’, this poem clearly lays out the themes for this volume as an erotic dual ‘singing’, linked to a rich literary history. This poem clearly states that Bradley and Cooper’s desire to be poets and lovers renders them at odds with society, and much of the rest of the poem is made up of images which capture their sense of disenfranchisement: To laugh and dream on Lethe’s shore, To sing to Charon in his boat, Heartening the timid souls afloat; Of judgment never to take heed, But to those fast-locked souls to speed, Who never from Apollo fled, Who spent no hour among the dead; Continually With them to dwell, Indifferent to heaven and hell.

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Yet ironically the poem works against this disenfranchisement by encoding its complaint within references to a literary history which Bradley and Cooper feel is actually very supportive of their desire to be poets and lovers. The anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth is also (as Bradley and Cooper would have been well aware) the date of Wordsworth’s death, and this phoenix-like moment of death and rebirth seems to signify the defeat of the Romantic solitary lyric ‘I’ in favour of the regeneration of an older, and perhaps less solipsistic, form of Elizabethan lyric voice. The brief invocation of Shakespeare would, for the contemporary reader, have brought with it a wealth of associations, but in this context it is the history and the reception of the sonnets, particularly, to which Bradley and Cooper appeal. Over the course of the nineteenth century critics struggled with the problem of the address to the young man within the sonnets. After earlier attempts to neutralise the problem, commentators at the end of the century found in the sonnets a strategy by which ‘Shakespeare has hid himself and is exposed’.7 This is something Wilde also comments on in ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ (1895), taking the criticism of Shakespeare, as well as the sonnets themselves, as his theme. Educated readers at the turn of the century are only too familiar with the ability of Shakespeare to support Michael Field’s part-disclosed and part-hidden homoerotic configuration of voice, which is one thread in the erotic narrative of the book. Indeed, in spite of Berenson’s warnings to the women about the quaintness that results from putting ‘new wine into old bottles’,8 one reviewer concluded that ‘A peculiarity of these poems is that while they are of antique mould, ancestral not merely in form but in expression, they are in feeling distinctly modern’.9 Shakespeare is perhaps the most obvious source appealed to in this poem, but the final line harbours other voices. Angela Leighton has discussed how Baudelaire’s 1857 poem ‘Lesbos’ – containing the line, ‘Et L’amour se rira de L’Enfer et du Ciel’ – is echoed here, reconnecting the women with those Sapphic sources explored in Chapter 2.10 Yet there is also a resonance with the Renaissance free-thinker Matteo Palmieri, invoked by Pater in The Renaissance, that must be acknowledged. La Citta` di Vita represented the human race as akin to those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer, were neither with God nor the Devil.11 Botticelli painted a picture which included the portrait of Palmieri and Pater argues that Botticelli’s human figures are profoundly influenced by this poem, often exhibiting that same quality of ‘the wistfulness of exiles’.12 This intertext complicates any simple Sapphic identification of the love declared in this

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poem, suggesting that the alienation depicted here might equally be a reflection of the human condition more generally. We see in this poem the same attempt to generalise desire – not limiting its significance to any one specific configuration – that I suggested in Chapter 2 was fundamental to Michael Field’s work. Whatever else is going on in this poem, the chain of references invoked (through Pater, to Botticelli and Palmieri, as well as to Shakespeare and Baudelaire) situates it in an aestheticist historical trajectory which, although aligned with the marginal, figures an extremely well-populated and companionable margin. In ‘It was deep April’, artists of the past are invoked to stand in solidarity with Bradley and Cooper, to legitimise the erotic dual authorship of their poetry (for that is what ‘Poets and lovers’ signifies), and to add more voices to their chorus. However, while multiple Elizabethan and Renaissance figures are prominently enlisted in this volume, it must seem, at least initially, that the Ruba´iya´t of the epigraph presents the strongest context for legitimising Michael Field’s dual vocality. The Ruba´iya´t was enjoying a renewed popularity in the late nineteenth century after Edward Fitzgerald’s 1859 translation.13 Swinburne’s ‘Laus Veneris’ (1866), for example, was inspired by the same source. The epigraph of Michael Field’s book is verse twelve of the poem: A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, – and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness – Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

This verse sets up two important contexts for Michael Field’s volume. One is a context of pleasure (particularly erotic pleasure): the book of verses together with the wine and bread make this scene a picnic of sensual delights.14 More importantly, it also signals the idea of sharing song. While Sullivan was later to illustrate this verse of the Ruba´iya´t with a woodcut depicting ‘thou’ and ‘me’ as a heterosexual couple, the lack of gender specificity in the poem enables it to become another source of the amorphous, and universalising, desire from which Bradley and Cooper drew their poetic energy. It is no accident that Shakespeare and the Ruba´iya´t, between them, situate Underneath the Bough within the context of two key themes: erotic pleasure, and a shared song which opposed post-Romantic lyric solitariness. Moreover, both sources represent mysterious or contested sites of desire. The ambiguity of Shakespeare’s sonnets, for the nineteenth

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century, represented a space for the possibility of the homoerotic, while the ancient Persian context of the Ruba´iya´t offers the opportunity to glimpse an erotic mode which resists the clinical definition of sexology. There is an almost mystical quality to the eroticism depicted in Michael Field’s poetry which seems to place their desire very far from contemporaneous attempts to encode love scientifically. The model that most clearly seems to fit Bradley and Cooper’s articulation of desire, in all its manifestations, is that of what Foucault calls the ‘ars erotica’, which he opposes to the scientia sexualis practised by our civilisation (while at the same time linking the two in various ways). The scientia sexualis came from the confession and established a ritual in which procedures for talking about sexual relations were set within a framework of ‘knowledge-power’.15 Foucault argues that the nineteenth century contributed to the development of this scientia sexualis specifically by causing these confessional procedures to be set within a scientific discourse. This scientia sexualis is based on the pleasure of knowing the truth, ‘of discovering and exposing it, the fascination of seeing it and telling it’.16 Within the ars erotica, on the other hand – which operated in China, Japan, India, Rome, the ‘Arabo-Moslem societies’ – the means of producing the truth about sex operated on the basis of the initiation and the ‘masterful secret’.17 Confessed truths and mysterious learned initiations into pleasure are opposed by Foucault in a manner which enables us to see Michael Field’s poetic practice as an attempt to resist the new scientific discourse of sex.18 Foucault describes the erotic art thus: In the erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as experience; pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experienced as pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul.19

This, then, is what I suggest Michael Field took from the Ruba´iya´t. Although Persia (Iran) wasn’t, and isn’t, an Arab country, the Ruba´iya´t is surely as good an example as Foucault could hope for of a Muslim ‘erotic art’? The collaboration with the past, and with a strange and distant land, allowed Bradley and Cooper to avoid the categories of sexology (the permitted and forbidden) in favour of a truth which is found in pleasure itself. While Long Ago evaded diagnosis by creating a Tiresian ambivalence between the homosexual and heterosexual, Underneath the Bough enables Bradley and Cooper to avoid altogether definition in relation to such a system of categorisation.

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This explains the tone of the poetry found in this volume; its mysterious eroticism which is teasingly vague, but inviting. In erotic art the knowledge gained through pleasure ‘must remain secret’ – ‘not because of an element of infamy that might attach to its object, but because of the need to hold it in the greatest reserve, since, according to tradition, it would lose its effectiveness and its virtue by being divulged’.20 This explanation helps us to see that Michael Field’s erotic song in Underneath the Bough is inexplicit, not because it is prudish, but rather because the truths of sex are only potent if they remain hidden within a poetry of reserve. Bradley and Cooper assert the eroticism of mystery in opposition to science. Pleasure is all that is exposed to the reader in this erotic art, while truth must remain secret and divorced from the knowledge to which sexology would reduce it. Much of Michael Field’s poetic language resonates with the Ruba´iya´t, although it would be overstating the case to argue in all instances for the overt intertextual reference we find in this volume.21 This allegiance to the erotic art tradition is severely challenged when the women convert to Catholicism and they do seem to shift a little more towards a scientia sexualis mode of understanding sexuality: they are absorbed into the tradition of the confession in which they admit to ‘fleshly sins’ and seem to operate more in relation to sexological encodings.22 On the other hand, perhaps another reason why Bradley and Cooper were attracted to Catholicism was that it was one of the elements of our civilisation which retained traces of the ars erotica within it, and the mystery of the Trinity quickly became for them – as I will show in Chapter 6 – synonymous with the mystery of erotic art. Within contemporaneous scholarship on Shakespeare, as well as in verse twelve of the Ruba´iya´t, Bradley and Cooper find a suitable context for their shared erotic song. The ambiguity gathering around the persona of the Elizabethan playwright, along with the mystery of ars erotica, are harnessed to express the mystery they inculcate around the dual identity of Michael Field. The women’s dual authorship is, without doubt, itself a kind of erotic secret, the true meaning of which can only be learned through the reader’s initiation, through close reading, into the poetry. berry and bloom: desire and difference in michael field’s duality The co-authorship was without doubt a reflection of Bradley and Cooper’s personal intimacy. David J. Moriarty has claimed that the reason for the poet’s obscurity was ultimately not the pseudonym or the

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collaboration per se, but ‘that these poets of liberty never succeeded in breaking through the confines of their passionate devotion to each other’.23 The women’s close relationship was a framework and a motivation for their art which may have seemed rather eccentric to some, but it is worth remembering that literary collaboration between women was not by any means without precedent in the nineteenth century. As well as the more familiar examples such as Edith Somerville and Martin Ross (distant cousins who lived and wrote together), there was ‘Pansy’ (Isabella M. Alden), who wrote novels in collaboration with other women,24 and the sisters Emily and Dorothea Geary, who collaborated on novels under the name E. D. Gerard (My Neighbour in 1882, and A Sensitive Plant in 1891).25 Bradley and Cooper claimed that their work could not be separated in the way that they, themselves, were inseparable: ‘Spinoza, with his fine grasp of unity, says: ‘‘if two [insert] individuals of exactly the same nature [end insert] natures are joined together, they make up a single individual, double stronger than each alone’’, i.e. Edith & I make veritable Michael’.26 In another letter to Browning, dated 30 May 1884, Cooper describes her collaboration with her aunt as follows: My Aunt & I work together after the fashion of Beaumont & Fletcher. She is my senior by but 15 yrs. She has lived with me, taught me, encouraged me & joined me to her poetic life. She was the enthusiastic student of the Bacchae. Some of the scenes of our plays are like mosaic-work – the mingled, various product of our two brains. [ . . . .] I think if our contributions were disentangled & [insert] one [end insert] subtracted [insert] from the other [end insert], the amount would be nearly even. This happy union of two in work & aspiration is sheltered & expressed by ‘Michael Field’. Please regard him as the author.27

A couple of years later (in a letter dated 1886), Cooper offers Browning an artistic manifesto in rather different, but equally personal terms. Cooper writes that Bradley designed the bramble-bough drawn on the cover of Brutus Ultor as an ‘emblem of our united life’, and she quotes some lines Bradley wrote to her: My poet-bride, sweet song-mate, do I doom Thy youth to age’s dull society? On the same bramble-bough the pale-cheeked bloom [?]Fondling by purple berry loves to lie; Fed by one sap & sunshine, there is room For fruit & flower in living unity.28

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Indeed, we see the same thing in another letter to Browning (29 May 1886), only this time it is Bradley who writes explaining their unity: I cannot help remembering that you know to the full the mystery & significance of companionship with a fellow-poet, & therefore will gently suffer me to speak a little of the comfort I have in the ‘Better-half ’ of ‘Callirrhoe¨’. Indeed it is rather as a poet-rearer than a poet that I ask for fame. Of Edith & me it is literally true that in Celia’s pretty phrase ‘she & I am one’. I am proud that I have cherished & guarded her, & given her a climate of genial spring. Don’t think of us as aunt & niece: all that we are to each other is expressed in some lines I wrote to her from which I venture to quote. X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X XX X X ‘By time set a space apart We are bound by such close ties None can tell of either breast The native sigh Who try To learn with whom the muse is guest. How sovereignly I’m blest To see & smell the rose of my own youth In thee, how pleasant lies My life, at rest From dream; its hope exprest Before mine eyes!’29

All these statements attempt to articulate how bodies interact within space and time – ‘By time set a space apart / We are bound by such close ties’ – and all depict a harmonious dance between the two poetic voices. But what about the reality of the collaboration? In the letter cited above, Bradley explains how the collaboration works in practice: You may be amused to hear that I have such absolute confidence in my songmate’s dramatic instincts that I have quietly suffered her to cut from Callirrhoe¨ act I, scene III, 150 lines; & from the last scene of the same play 200! I laugh to come back to my m.s. when she has been pruning it, & find a third of my work gone.30

Bradley goes on to say who wrote which portions of the play. The same point is made in more rhetorical terms in a letter to Havelock Ellis in May 1886, where they write: the work is perfect mosaic: we cross and interlace like a company of dancing summer flies; if one begins a character, his companion seizes and possesses it; if one conceives a scene or situation, the other corrects, completes, or murderously cuts away.31

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This process of collaboration is further explained by Charles Ricketts in his short biography, where he explains how the two women sketched out plans for the work to be done, worked separately on different scenes of a play and then compared work, edited it together, ‘till finally amended and made smooth by Henry’.32 This evidence points to a division of labour in the drama, but the genre of lyric poetry must surely have presented more problems for such collaborative practice.33 Were the poems written solely by one or the other of the women, even if they swapped work for editing? Or was real collaboration possible on the writing of a lyric poem? We have the example of Baron Corvo (pen-name of Frederick Rolfe) and John Holden composing rondeaux together by pinning up manuscript pages and working in tandem, and perhaps something similar happened, on occasion, with Bradley and Cooper.34 Turning to the manuscript copy of Michael Field’s poetry is of little help. In the diaries we can often see a poem written in the hand of one woman (sometimes with editorial markings by the other), but if they were composing jointly aloud and one was acting as scribe the written evidence would be the same and so can tell us little for certain. Many critics (including one reviewer from the nineteenth century)35 have nonetheless turned to one particular poem to argue for evidence of the inscription of the dual authorship within it. In ‘A girl’, the writer of the poem describes her muse/beloved in sensuous terms but makes it clear that the poem written by one alone is not a complete poem, and that the ‘girl’ herself must take up the pen and finish the draft: 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. (pp. 68–9)

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Angela Leighton, in Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart, situates the poem in a tradition of Sapphic lyrics of love between women. The final invitation to ‘come to it’, she writes, remains an ‘open-ended double entendre of love and poetry together’.36 Leighton describes it as ‘Half a love poem’, and half a poem of ‘verbally giving birth’. The poem is left, half finished, waiting for the other author to leave her mark and so declare it as the product of two who write as one. ‘A girl’ appears to figure the premise of its own collaborative poetic composition, offering a radical challenge to the solitary voice of the Romantic lyric. But this half-poem is more unstable than Leighton recognises. It is impossible not to notice that ‘A girl’ fails in its attempt to invoke reciprocal dialogue. While taken as emblematic of the women’s collaborative poetic practice, it in fact only inscribes a possibility that is left hanging tantalisingly. The tension between sameness and difference, between unity and dissolution, dramatised here is actually at the heart of Bradley and Cooper’s aesthetic if we look closely and don’t simply believe their own rhetoric of natural unity. As demonstrated in Chapter 2, it is a mistake to tie Michael Field too closely into a tradition of ‘likeness’ because the masculinity of the pseudonym inscribes the importance of difference. It is a need for both sameness and difference that characterises Michael Field’s fetishistic strategy. Cooper writes above of being ‘two individuals of exactly the same nature’, yet their difference, in age, appearance and temperament, is acknowledged in the image of ‘palecheeked bloom’ and ‘purple berry’ existing on the same bramble-bough. Bradley maintains in another letter cited above that Cooper’s difference is as much a part of her as her own youth: ‘How sovereignly I’m blest / To see & smell the rose of my own youth / In thee’. There is an instability in these claims for simultaneous identity and difference which shows the strain of collaboration, barely hidden in Bradley’s claim, above, to laugh it off, and suffer it ‘quietly’, when she returns to her manuscript and finds a third of it cut by her niece’s pen. The result is, as noted by Wayne Koestenbaum, a mix of protestations of intricate mosaic-like intermingling, with scenes of ‘murderous’ editing.37 Recent critical debate about the dual authorship of Michael Field settles into two parallel tramlines: one arguing for a theoretical unification of voice, while the other traces the inevitably fissured material act of composition. Virginia Blain has been the most thorough advocate of the latter. In cleaning off ‘the tarnish of surface unity in order to ‘‘restore’’ some more dynamic account of the relationship’, she notes how the aunt and niece found difference within similarity: both competing for the

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masculine role.38 She also draws attention to the struggles within the relationship, undercutting Bradley and Cooper’s own rhetoric about their unity as well as their critics’, and claiming that the univocal pseudonym was consciously produced and inscribed over a discourse of separateness which ‘is never entirely erased from the text’.39 On a very literal level, this enterprise sees Blain exposing the myth of univocality by offering evidence that some poems were clearly written by one woman or the other, even though they were published as joint compositions. Yopie Prins, meanwhile, has most notably argued for Bradley and Cooper’s poetic ‘chorus’. (Prins has expounded this argument in relation to Long Ago, but it is wholly relevant here to my analysis of Underneath the Bough and its articulation of ‘singing together’.) Prins writes about Michael Field’s inhabitation of the Sapphic signature in Long Ago, and the complications and implications that ensue from the double signature operating within the single lyric voice. She argues that they ‘turn to Sappho [ . . . ] in order to develop a model of lyric authorship in which voice is the effect of an eroticized textual mediation between the two of them rather than the representation of an unmediated solitary utterance’.40 Prins describes this challenge to the solitary lyric as consisting in a preference for ‘a chorus of voices’, which ‘pluralizes and textualizes lyric voice’.41 Elsewhere, Prins figures this dual vocality through the work of Luce Irigaray. Irigaray’s utopian impossibility of two lips speaking together, ‘each touching the other without distinguishing what touches from what is touched’, is what Prins finds imagined in Bradley and Cooper’s work: figuring a ‘place where ‘‘I’’ can address ‘‘you’’ as a figure of feminine self-doubling’.42 In her review of Prins’s Victorian Sappho (a book whose chapter on Michael Field is based on the two journal papers already cited), Blain inevitably questions this supposed challenge to the single ‘I’ of the lyric poem, arguing that collaboration in writing can never be a chorus, and only ever a series of ‘cunning alterations’.43 Moreover, Blain claims that it makes no difference to the lyric ‘I’ of the poem whether that poem was penned by two or three or more writers because the illusion of singleness remains.44 This debate about how the dual authorship functions poetically is the crux of Michael Field’s lyric construction, and, I will suggest, it is the issue at the heart of Underneath the Bough. It is this question – so eloquently posed by critical debate thus far – that I hope to answer by the end of this chapter. In order to resolve the dialectic between ideal and real collaborative practice, I will focus on its inscription within the lyric and its textual effect. There are specifically textual answers to these questions of dual vocality, contained within the workings of the poems themselves.

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There is no doubt that Bradley and Cooper’s dual authorship had a profound effect on their textuality. Michael Field’s textual disruption of the lyric ‘I’ enables them to bypass effectively a problem of poetic identity with which many of their female contemporaries struggled. This dual aesthetic is far more than an indulgent inscription of their love and literary co-authorship; it also is – or at least becomes – a sophisticated mechanism for coping with a key theoretical problem of the nineteenthcentury lyric. The lyric is ‘the most dialectical of Victorian genres’.45 Dialectics of speech and silence, presence, and absence, are particularly central, and critics have interpreted these structuring antitheses in different ways, but all note the gendered nature of these oppositions in which the silent and the absent is feminine. The absent audience, the silenced, feminised, ‘you’ so central to the apostrophe that characterised the nineteenth-century lyric, is a familiar figure, commonly recognised in studies of the nineteenthcentury poem. The gendering of the absent object/audience/muse/ beloved of the poem causes, as critics have been quick to notice, a problem for women poets who want to position themselves as the poem’s author or subject rather than its object. Michael Field’s female contemporaries at the end of the century frequently appear to be struggling with this issue. What is most surprising about Bradley and Cooper’s work, when put in this context, is that it pays almost no attention to such themes. In Chapter 2 I cited A. Mary F. Robinson’s mildly flirtatious letter to ‘Michael Field Esqre’, which showed the very feminine Robinson anxious to meet this poetic master. Robinson’s ‘An Address to the Nightingale (From Aristophanes)’ is a good example of the dilemma of the woman poet outlined above.46 The nightingale is pulled both ways: as the singer she could be the subject, the poet, but being female she must remain in the position of the muse. Throughout the poem she is continually displaced from the role of singer or poet. The poem is based around a passage in Aristophanes’s The Birds, which reworks the myth of Tereus and Philomela. Rather than presenting the usual lament for the mutilation and deception of the women, she writes the cry of Tereus for his dead son Itys, which calls on the Nightingale, the current incarnation of Tereus’s first wife, to sing with him. Robinson’s poem begins, then, with an invocation to the most conventional of muses. But it is no accident that this nightingale is a woman who has already been brutally silenced by having her tongue cut out. The narrator, Tereus, voices relief at the appearance of his muse and bids the bird sing a lament for the death of

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Itys: ‘thy son and mine’. Yet we never hear the song of the nightingale; instead, the nightingale’s hypothesised song is imagined by Tereus to provoke an answering elegy from Apollo: ‘Hark! from immortal throats arise / Diviner threnodies / That sound and swoon in a celestial moan / And answer back thine own’. The nightingale is now the muse for another poet, a surpassing poet, whose ‘immortal throat’ can produce a ‘diviner threnod[y]’ than that of mortal creatures. ‘An Address to the Nightingale’ shows graphically the problems for the woman poet trying to speak from the position of the feminine muse, or object of the poem. The multiple usurpations of her role charted in this poem are typical of the woman poet’s representation of her voice. Yet this is not a poem Bradley and Cooper could have written, because they didn’t occupy the same position within the poetic system that Robinson did. Indeed, when, in Long Ago, Michael Field did write a comparable poem invoking Philomel, the dual ‘I’ narrator is clearly separate from the nightingale, the nightingale clearly her muse (poem XII, Long Ago): ‘Spring’s messenger we hail, / The sweet-voiced nightingale’. Even when compared with poems which do find empowering strategies for the woman poet (and there are lots of these by the end of the century), Michael Field’s poems are distinctive for their ability to assume this power, rather than fight for it. Take, for example, May Probyn’s ‘The Model’ – a poem which fits into a tradition of artist and model poems which tend to see woman as initially the object, the model, but one who is empowered so that she also becomes the subject, rather than the traditional manipulated, passive figure of the male gaze.47 This poem is in many ways rather similar to Michael Field’s ‘A Portrait’ from Sight and Song (pp. 27–30). Both models find their strength through what might usually be perceived as their weakness: the necessity for them to decorate and alter their appearance in order to be objectified in a painting. Probyn’s model dresses and arranges herself to become the other woman of mythology (Herodias): ‘It only wants the hair, cloud-falling – so!’, ‘Tis but to drop the chin into the palm, / Thrust both a little forward – thus!’; ‘And there she sits, the beautiful, bad thing’. So, the model is complicit in a denial of her own identity, creating herself as the image of woman that the artist wants to see. Likewise, Michael Field’s model: ‘to the prompting of her strange, emphatic insight true, / She bares one breast, half-freeing it of robe, / And hangs the green-water gem and cord beside the naked globe. / So she was painted and for centuries / Has held the fading field-flowers in her hand’. Yet, while Probyn’s model escapes an inherently disempowering scenario by walking out of the studio and

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the picture – and escaping the clutches of the abusive painter – Michael Field’s poem takes part in no such dichotomy between subject and object. In ‘A Portrait’ (in contrast with Probyn’s poem, even the title avoids signalling the artist/model dichotomy), the model is perfectly at ease with the same scenario. Probyn’s model struggles long and hard with the situation (which is clearly a metaphor for that between poet and muse), and triumphs against the oppression of the painter who denies her identity. Michael Field’s model, on the other hand, nonchalantly assumes control within a scenario where the painter does not even feature. She triumphs not over the painter, but over mortality, and, far from needing to escape the position of the model, her role as the object of the painting is instrumental in achieving this victory. The problem for Michael Field’s contemporaries is that the Victorian woman poet is trying to be ‘two things at once, or in two places, whenever she tries to locate herself within the poetic world’.48 Dorothy Mermin has thoroughly documented the problems for the woman writer, who has to play two opposing roles at one time – ‘both knight and damsel, both subject and object’49 – because to become its author and subject is often, in Mermin’s analysis, to take on an extra role, not an alternative one. It is not enough, then, for the Victorian woman writer to claim her authority and her position as subject. She must also relinquish the role of object. These are problems that Michael Field’s underlying duality seems to avoid altogether. It should be acknowledged, however, that both Robinson and Probyn experimented with ingenious solutions to the problems that structure the above poems. A. Mary F. Robinson’s ‘Love Without Wings’, for example, develops a strategy that provides a particularly close and useful comparison for Bradley and Cooper’s work.50 This is a good example of what Margaret Reynolds calls a ‘sistermuse’ poem. Reynolds argues that the kind of ungendered union which we see in this poem breaks down the usual oppositional relationship between poet and muse and represents a new kind of Sapphic song. In the scenario Reynolds traces, the female narrator takes Sappho as her muse, but the two sing a duet: ‘a collaboration, a singing in unison which gave new freedoms and new permissions’. The muse here is ‘not a rival, but a partner’.51 The relationship between subject and object in ‘Love Without Wings’ defies conventional poet and muse positionings by trying to rediscover an ungendered state before difference was recognised: when ‘I’ and ‘you’ were indistinct. In ‘Love Without Wings’ Robinson imagines a communion between ‘you’ and ‘I’ which undoes the traditional sense of identity by differentiation.

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In song II we learn that the communion between subject and object is sightless, thus avoiding the visual recognition of their separateness from each other: We sat when shadows darken, And let the shadows be: Each was a soul to hearken, Devoid of eyes to see.

In song VI we hear how their communion is also achieved without language: And you to me said never a word, Nor I a single word to you. And yet how sweet a thing was heard, Resolved, abandoned by us two!

Without language, the difference between them can be ‘resolved’ and ‘abandoned’ by them; they can get back to a pre-linguistic sense of wholeness. In this pre-Imaginary state of union, dichotomised roles of poet and muse are abandoned: the speaker, or poet, is as much a muse to ‘you’ as ‘you’ is to the speaker. Therefore conventional imagery is inverted: ‘I haunt you like the magic of a poet, / And charm you like a song’ (song VII; my emphasis). The dichotomy between speech and silence in this poem does not reinforce the usual distinction between subject and object, but helps erase it. When one is silent, so is the other (song VI), and the silence unifies them: ‘I’ and ‘you’ become ‘us two’. Similarly when ‘I’ sings, she sings with ‘you’. Both muses and both poets, they sing a duet of ‘we two’ (song VIII). Even the articulation in the poem of ‘I’ and ‘you’ is to enter into the dichotomy that Robinson wants to reject. The poem ends with this vision of the two meeting and singing together – a song which echoes on throughout eternity. Poet and muse are one: the gendered dichotomy is dispelled. We might speculate that the sister-muse device is particularly likely to be born out of a homoerotic aesthetic. Certainly Robinson’s relationship with Vernon Lee suggests she might profitably be thought of in this way, and the aesthetic identified here is one which, whether or not it is explicitly homoerotic, is written in a homoerotic mode.52 So, what relationship does this sister-muse strategy bear to Michael Field’s motherdaughter-aunt-niece-sister-lover model? Holly Laird’s sensitive reading of Michael Field’s work finds a similar dynamic in ‘A girl’. Laird writes that

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here the relationship between poet and beloved has been radically destabilised in ways which unsettle the usual prerogative of the male gaze, and invites a reciprocal gaze between the two.53 Holly Laird states that she is interested in the ‘desire of two likenesses (not identicalities) for each other’ and recommends that ‘we neither can nor ought to try to tell coauthors apart’.54 She offers instead a ‘collaborative model of reciprocally operating power exchanges between two desiring subjects’.55 Yet I don’t think that the sister-muse strategy is quite the right one to apply to Michael Field’s work. It is worth remembering that Bradley and Cooper’s dual-authorship strategy depended absolutely on the differences upon which the possibility of language was premised. Unlike Robinson’s utopian call for a deconstructive lyrical ‘sameness’ and equality, Michael Field’s aesthetic was, as explored in Chapter 2, based upon a fetishising difference which allows them to work within existing lyrical structures while imposing a dialectic where object and subject positions are taken by turn. For this reason the invocation of the Imaginary, or pre-symbolic realm so apparent in Robinson’s vision is inappropriate to explaining Bradley and Cooper’s duality. I have already noted Yopie Prins’s use of Luce Irigaray’s theory of the ‘two lips’ to read this dual authorship.56 Irigaray’s essay, which theorises a mode of feminine expression based on duality, is used very suggestively by Prins to explore what the collaboration might mean, but this ‘logic of touch’ which refuses ‘the distinction between subject and object’ is in danger of conflating mutuality with similarity.57 Difference was clearly crucial to Bradley and Cooper’s articulation of their relationship even if they shared those roles equally, and this belief will be at the core of my reading of their dual authorship. The pre-symbolic is no setting for their articulation of poetic identity, and even Laird’s model of reciprocation between two likenesses is missing the crucial marker of tension and difference between the two women which structures their collaboration. Michael Field’s dual authorship enables Bradley and Cooper to bypass the problems of poetic identity faced by many other women poets of the time by allowing an approach to the lyric that inscribes uncompromised authorial presence. The exploration of erotic configurations of multiple voice in Underneath the Bough brings the benefits of this strategy very much to the fore. Like Laird, I too find in Michael Field’s poetry a ‘collaborative model of reciprocally operating power exchanges between two desiring subjects’.58 Michael Field’s poems are at once by both women and to each other. Both are poet and muse. Yet, unlike Laird, I

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don’t see this exchange as based around a homoerotic model of likeness. What is crucial to Bradley and Cooper’s poetics is their use of the inscription of difference. I draw, here, on a model used in recent lesbian theory, but it is important that, true to Michael Field’s fetishistic strategy, it is a homosexual model that revolves around difference as much as sameness. Although originating in a temporally distant and distinct conception of same-sex desire, Marilyn Farwell’s essay ‘Toward a Definition of the Lesbian Literary Imagination’ is helpful for reading Michael Field’s work. Farwell makes a case for the usefulness of the lesbian as a metaphor for female creativity. She makes it clear that not all metaphoric lesbians are actual lesbians, and vice versa.59 I have traced the link between Bradley and Cooper’s private articulation of their relationship and their public face, arguing that their erotic identity forms the basis of their poetics. Yet what follows is not a direct appeal to their actual sexual orientation, or to some ahistorical notion of their ‘lesbianism’, but to their textual strategies.60 Farwell asserts that women need – in order to find a new language in which they can be subjects, authors and readers – to acknowledge the presence of women to each other. ‘In this act of attention’, writes Farwell, ‘women become both the lover and the beloved, subject and object’.61 It is this becoming subject and object that interests me: a formulation that appears time and time again in late twentieth-century lesbian theory. In The Practice of Love, Teresa De Lauretis endorses Helene Deutsch’s assertion that the successful lesbian relationship is one ‘where the contrast was not between male and female but between activity and passivity, and ‘‘the feeling of happiness lay in the possibility of being able to play both roles’’ ’: Women can play two roles (active, sadistic/passive, masochistic). The differences and similarity, nonidentity and yet identity, the quasidouble experience of oneself, the simultaneous liberation from one part of one’s ego and its preservation and sexuality in the possession of the other, are among the attractions of the homosexual experience.62

The beauty of the lesbian model set out here is that it works with an inscription of difference – unlike the Irigarayan model invoked by other critics, whose sisterly relationships lack erotic difference – but refuses to fix its terms. This creates a dynamic environment in which roles can be taken on and swapped with such mobility that equality is ensured within the structures of difference. Lauretis believes that, even when a lesbian appears to be playing out a so-called ‘butch’ or ‘femme’ role, she still

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blurs the boundaries these roles seem to set up – wanting to be at the same time ‘desiring subject and desiring object’.63 If my discussion of the fetish in Chapter 2 argued for a crucial element of difference in the relationship between the two women, these theories add to that model a fuller account of the mutuality and reciprocity which I claimed was a part of it. Bradley and Cooper needed to exist within an unequal binary, but they could alternate between those positions to ensure the inequality never became fixed. This becoming both subject and object is, I claim, what Bradley and Cooper’s mutual-erotic poetics grants them. Their aesthetic allows them, within a binary marked by difference through the fetishistic pseudonym, to undermine the fixed oppositions which tie masculinity to subject and femininity to object. They can play with these roles, being both one and the other, and so circumvent many of the problems struggled with by other women writers. For Bradley and Cooper, as for those theorists quoted above, this is not a matter of lapsing into sameness, but rather the ability to swap roles and play either part in the relationship. The letter Bradley wrote to John Gray, quoted at the end of Chapter 2, indicates this mutuality: in her list of permitted relationships – ‘lover & loved’, ‘mother & child’, ‘server & served’, ‘– not mother & mother’ – Bradley doesn’t specify who plays which role, and she isn’t objecting to Cooper taking the dominant role: she simply wants to ensure difference between them.64 The importance of preserving the poet/muse conventions, while simultaneously being able to move between positions, can be seen in all the poems I examine in this chapter. For example, ‘If I But Dream That Thou Art Gone’ (p. 71) – another poem from the third book of songs in Underneath the Bough – uses quite a traditional love poem scenario, but the important difference comes in the underlying poetics: that the poem is composed around a mutuality between ‘I’ and ‘thou’ (whether or not it was actually written by the two women together). If I but dream that thou art gone, My heart aches to o’ertake thee; How shall I then forsake thee In clear daylight, Who art my very joy’s nativity – Thee, whose sweet soul I con Secure to find Perfect epitome Of nature, passion, poesy? From thee untwined,

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I shall but wander a disbodied sprite, Until thou wake me With thy kiss-warme`d breath, and take me Where we are one.

The beloved is cast in the typical muse position; existing for the poet to find in her soul, ‘Perfect epitome / Of nature, passion, poesy’. She exists to inspire and yield up for another. The beloved appears to be the traditional ‘other’: passive, used and abused. This is no Robinsonian vision of pre-symbolic sameness: difference is crucial to this relationship. However, as soon as we learn that the poem is written within the system of poetics where beloved and lover are interchangeable, and both are writing this poem to each other, while both are yielding inspiration to each other, the relationship becomes a two-way interaction, rather than exploitation. This distinctive aesthetic is gestured towards at the end of the poem. Here the subject of the poem claims to be disembodied when separate from the beloved; but surely this is the call of the muse who cannot exist unless the poet writes her? After all, the poet embodies the muse through his or her writing, not vice versa. At the end of the poem, then, the subject is acknowledging her position as muse, as much dependent on the other as the other is on her. Both can only thrive in the space ‘where we are one’ – in the textual space of Michael Field where difference is not eradicated, but where a mutuality within structures of difference guarantees equality. poetic presence and lyric chorus The authorial presence entailed in this textual inscription of collaboration works in sharp contrast to the motifs of absence which haunt women’s poetry at this time. Robinson and Probyn may feel that as women poets they are constantly in danger of being absented from the role of poetic subject (unless such dichotomies are removed altogether), but for Bradley and Cooper the absence of one can only mean the presence of the other: by turning the poet/muse dichotomy into a partnership, they can’t lose. Yet its not just the problems of the woman poet that are countered by this dual poetic subjectivity: in their construction of authorship, Bradley and Cooper respond to a variety of absences which they find layered within, and definitive of, the Victorian lyric. Michael Field’s recognition of, and response to, the problem of poetic absence is shown eloquently in ‘Already to mine eyelids’ shore’, from the

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third book of songs of Underneath the Bough. This is a poem against parting: Already to mine eyelids’ shore The gathering waters swell, For thinking of the grief in store When thou wilt say ‘Farewell.’ I dare not let thee leave me, sweet, Lest it should be for ever; Tears dew my kisses ere we meet, Foreboding we must sever: Since we can neither meet nor part, Methinks the moral is, sweetheart, That we must dwell together. (p. 67)

That love is here predicated on thoughts of loss is neither unusual nor surprising in a textual tradition based on a thanatos–eros drive. The critic Henry Staten writes of the way in which, in western literature, ‘mourning is the horizon of all desire’: ‘In a study of this tradition it is thus not only possible but necessary to transpose the problematic of desire into the key of mourning’.65 Staten writes of the despair consequent on loving a mortal being as mortal, and the transcendent love that breaks this bind. However, I will suggest that in Michael Field’s poetry the conventional connection between mourning and desire takes on an unusual lyrical configuration. This poem situates itself on the site of multiple absences. Initially it sets itself up as an elegy, and elegy revolves around one very significant absence at its centre: the dead beloved. The elegiac concerns are signalled through resonances with the arch-elegy of the period, Tennyson’s In Memoriam. The opening sections of Tennyson’s work deal with the period of limbo between Tennyson’s learning of Hallam’s death and the body being returned to Britain for burial. During these opening sequences, the body is in transit on a ship back to Britain. The imagery of tears and eyelids in the first four lines of Michael Field’s poem mimic the imagery of waters and shores so prevalent in the opening sections of Tennyson’s work (see, for example, section 12). A later fragment of Tennyson’s poem bears particular resemblance to Bradley and Cooper’s poem: But in my spirit will I dwell, And dream my dream, and hold it true; For though my lips may breathe adieu, I cannot think the thing farewell.66

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Both verses are written around iambic feet, Bradley and Cooper’s form varying from Tennyson’s in that it alternates lines of four feet with lines of three feet. Tennyson’s rhyme of ‘dwell’ with ‘farewell’ is echoed by Bradley and Cooper’s ‘swell’ and ‘farewell’. With these echoes, there is already, at the core of Michael Field’s poem, an inscription of an absence which is monumental, and which lies at the centre of the Victorian lyric tradition as well as at the heart of one particular articulation of grief. Yet, for Bradley and Cooper, the elegy is for ‘grief in store’ rather than a loss which has already occurred, and so the poem can still confidently end with an assertion of presence: ‘Methinks the moral is, sweetheart, / That we must dwell together’. A strange elegy, this, which simply reinscribes the presence of the beloved. Tennyson’s icon of absence and death is invoked only for Bradley and Cooper to counter it with presence and life: on the most literal level this is an elegy without a corpse. Elegy generically encodes the absence of its dead object by itself formally displacing and replacing the lost person. The very utterance which mourns the loss and tries to bring back the dead also fixes his or her absence and replaces him or her. (The same is true of the Petrarchan love poem – a form also operative within In Memoriam.) The convention of elegy allows the poem to take the place of the loved one, thus inscribing and ensuring his absence as much as his presence. In Tennyson’s poem, his invocation of Shakespeare’s sonnets also acts to increase the distance between subject and object of the poem as Hallam is, through them, further transformed into literary effigy. Yet Tennyson’s strange intermingling of love lyric and elegy is resolved by Michael Field in whose poem elegy turns into, and is supplanted by, the love lyric in the last two lines. This is a lyric which toys with the tensions of love lyric and elegy – absence and presence – found in Tennyson’s poem, but ends decisively in a love mode with something of a folk-song legacy (an influence quite possibly from Bullen’s Song-Books). The ending of Michael Field’s lyric has none of the idealised, Petrarchan, absence, but rather a warm earthy acknowledgement of presence: ‘Methinks the moral is, sweetheart, / That we must dwell together’. It is accepted that the strength of In Memoriam lies in its ‘special kind of failure’: ‘it is a masterpiece of uncertainty’.67 But, although a form of double narrative, uncertainty is not the same as the paradox favoured by Michael Field. If absence and silence is the conclusion of Tennyson’s work, Bradley and Cooper oppose it with their own certainty of presence. This presence is paradoxical in the context of the elegy, but, as usual with Michael Field, this is not an indication of confusion or doubt: it is a paradoxical certainty.

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It is no coincidence that Bradley and Cooper situate their poem with reference to a work which has Shakespeare’s sonnets, and a discourse of same-sex desire, at its heart. Tennyson’s love for Hallam, and the eminent tradition of same-sex desire on which it draws, has a particular importance for Bradley and Cooper in their search for models (heteroerotic and homoerotic) to help them articulate their love publicly. In this respect Bradley and Cooper’s dual presence within ‘Already to Mine Eyelids’ Shore’ counters a tradition of unfulfilled same-sex desire at the heart of the canon. Bradley and Cooper write themselves into a narrative of absent, but potential, desire in order to give the story a, paradoxically, happy ending. Elegy for the impossibility of such desire metamorphoses, in their hands, into the love lyric. Tennyson’s poem signifies many different kinds of absence, and Bradley and Cooper’s positioning of their poem within its context is a deliberate invocation of those absences even as their poem works to counter them. Yet the very presence of Tennyson, and therefore Shakespeare, within Michael Field’s lyric, might be considered to risk further abstraction of the author of ‘Already to mine eyelids’ shore’. Rowlinson has written about the effects of nineteenth-century print culture on the lyric, claiming the ‘print-lyric’ as a totalising form ‘that at once preserves and supersedes its multiple predecessors’, absorbing and displacing both manuscript forms (such as the Greek and Latin lyric) and vernacular or aural forms.68 If print-lyric did become the summation of its own history, then this form of mediation at once makes earlier modes of lyric present yet absent.69 In this case, Shakespeare, as well as the elegiac tradition, is the apostrophe in Tennyson’s text. But at the same time the opposite is also true: in Tennyson’s poem the author of the elegy in the mid-nineteenth century will simultaneously be effaced by the very act of entering into a conventional mode of address, established over centuries, and competing with, as well as invoking, the great works of the past (not only those of Shakespeare, but also, for example, Milton’s Lycidas). Tennyson’s text may subsume the past as a totalising print-lyric, but only at the same moment as the heritage of conventional elegiac utterance threatens to subsume his own unique experience and expression. More generally, as an elegy, this poem places itself within a context of mourning definitive of the period. Due to Victoria’s own protracted period of grief, cultural motifs of elegy and absence were even more likely to efface the subject and consume him or her into a conventional discourse. Bradley and Cooper enter as another link in this chain and have to negotiate this Oedipal struggle as well as those struggles more specific to the woman poet discussed above.

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It is in this location of multiple absence that Bradley and Cooper initially situate ‘Already to mine eyelids’ shore’. One might even say that this poem is a study in lyric absence. Yet Bradley and Cooper deliberately take on these negative contexts in order to counter them with their dual aesthetic. Although I have described this duality as a solution explicitly presented in the final lines of the poem, it is actually written in from the start. The physiognomy of the poem highlights eyes and mouth, linking tears and kisses in line seven, and both encode physically the duality Bradley and Cooper claim to embody in their writing.70 Both eyelids and lips figure two mirroring halves which can neither truly ‘part’, being inextricably bound together, nor therefore ‘meet’ in any meaningful way. The ‘moral’ is clear from the image in the first line: the containment of the major motifs from the start of In Memoriam within the figure of the eyelids is intended to inscribe all those multiple layers of absence within an icon which guarantees lyric presence. That whole world of absence which underpinned the Victorian lyric (and particularly the continents and shores of Tennyson’s elegy) is signified by the tearful eye/I which also itself embodies a powerful antidote in its own natural duality. This ‘I’ can, with a bat of the eyelid, erase that absence on which the lyric is predicated and inscribe in its place a lyric presence on every level: tears turn to kisses. If the dual authorship enables the constant presence of the (usually absent) female object of the lyric, the reciprocal relationship with the ‘other’, by the same token, ensures the presence of the speaker.71 What appears to be a limbo of never meeting and never parting is actually the inscription of a new lyric subjecthood, based not on apostrophe but on the presence of the other. This poem morphs elegy into love lyric because the other is always present. Bradley and Cooper are not confined within the position of the poetess, who is constantly displaced, because they write not from a mythology of loss, but from a construction of eternal presence. In this way, their lyric strategy seems to hark back to a more Metaphysical poetic, in opposition to Tennyson’s classic statement of Victorian poetic absence. The declared Elizabethan literary modes have already been seen to be present within the volume in several different forms, but at a level deeper than simple intertextuality it is perhaps John Donne (who is as much Elizabethan as he is Jacobean) who is most important to understanding the poetics of Underneath the Bough, and Michael Field’s paradoxical conceits more generally. The late nineteenth-century renewal of interest in Metaphysical poetry, seen primarily through the work of critics such as Arthur Symons, Alice Meynell and Edmund Gosse, was,

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I suggest, influential in Bradley and Cooper’s work.72 A comparison of ‘Already to mine eyelids’ shore’ with John Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Of Weeping’ shows telling similarities.73 Both poems use the idea of the weeping eye, or the globe of the tear itself, as a microcosm for the sphere of the world and the continents and seas it contains. In Michael Field’s case, the simple invocation of the ‘eyelids’ shore’ does this work for them, while for Donne it is expanded into the globe that contains ‘An Europe, Afric, and an Asia’. But, most significantly, both poems end with an inscription of presence. Bradley and Cooper seem to take their concluding vision of lyric presence from Donne’s final instruction to grieve no more: ‘Since thou and I sigh one another’s breath, / Whoe’er sighs most, is cruellest, and hastes the other’s death’. Elegy is here, too, countered with the recognition of a more concrete and physical awareness of the other and the co-mingling of the two. Donne’s authority seems particularly helpful for Bradley and Cooper’s statement of dual presence and it is not surprising that at least one contemporary commented on their ‘Donne-ishness’.74 In his ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’,75 Donne writes of ‘Our two souls therefore, which are one’ and invokes the image of the pair of compasses which are connected even when the two feet are distant from one another. This, says Donne, is a ‘love, so much refined’, that it can find presence in absence. It is this logic of the Metaphysical lyric that Bradley and Cooper invoke by setting Underneath the Bough within an Elizabethan/Jacobean context, and they invoke Donne’s figuration of presence in order to aid their challenge to a Victorian intensity of lyric absence. Indeed, this brings a whole new (generic) dimension to our understanding of the motivation for the Metaphysical revival that has not before been noticed by critics. Jonathan Freedman comments that for all its ‘polemical praise of solipsism and selfishness’, ‘British aestheticism also spends much of its time lamenting the absence of a significant Other whom, it hopes, might somehow be able to complete or reunify the fragmented, isolated self ’.76 This is a challenge to which Bradley and Cooper rise in their reconfiguration of a very un-Victorian lyric presence. For Bradley and Cooper, then, the lyric is not ‘overheard’, in line with Mill’s famous definition, because it is often directly addressed from one woman to the other. If the peculiarity of the Victorian lyric ‘appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener’, and if ‘Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude’, then is Michael Field’s poetry somehow outside of the genre in an important way?77 To go back to the scientific definition of ‘field’ with which I began this

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book – this Field, unlike the solipsistic space in which the lyric is uttered alone, is most certainly ‘a region in which a body experiences a force as the result of the presence of some other body’. Bradley and Cooper’s lyric aesthetic is conditioned by the force which results from their presence to each other. The poetic ‘Field’ was, for Bradley and Cooper, precisely ‘a method of representing the way in which bodies are able to influence each other’ within a system which was supposed to preclude the touch of the other. The form within Victorian poetry which most closely resembles what Bradley and Cooper achieve here is the dramatic monologue. This kind of experiment also parodied Mill’s definition of the solipsistic lyric, and Robert Browning, amongst others, set a precedent for Michael Field’s aberration.78 Although the formal negotiation I have just traced in ‘Already to mine eyelids’ shore’ goes far beyond what we see in the dramatic monologue, the importance of the dramatic to Michael Field’s lyrical mode merits a little more consideration. Drama and poetry are always linked within the authorship of Michael Field, but they have a particularly special relationship in this volume due to the centrality of Shakespeare to its conception. While the dramatic monologue is not a form easily associated with Bradley and Cooper’s output (even the poems in Long Ago, voiced by Sappho, are not obviously examples of the type), there is a sense in which Michael Field is a fictional persona whose voice they invoke to contain their dual vocality. In this sense, Michael Field’s poetry embodies the drama of the dramatic monologue in a more overt way because the audience ceases to be mute and enters the poem vocally. Michael Field’s poetry is ‘staged’, just as Bradley and Cooper’s persona is contrived. The eyelids which frame this poem contain the poetic ‘I’ (which in turn contains the vast oceans and continents invoked at the beginning as the property of the mind’s eye), and this ‘unlidded eye’ – or exposed lyric ‘I’ – is, for Michael Field, in some sense equivalent to the dramatic space of the theatrical stage: ‘there is no place on earth where I am externally so happy as in a theatre [ . . . ] the excitement of the unlidding of the stage’s eye’.79 It seems quite clear, then, that Bradley and Cooper are interested in how the lyric poem necessarily exists within space and time, in the same way drama does. Michael Field is cast within this role of the lyric ‘I’, but the real action takes place between Bradley and Cooper in this dramatic, duologue, challenge to the premise of absence in the Victorian lyric. Poems such as ‘Already to mine eyelids’ shore’ speculate about lyric absence, and about the possible death of one of the pair of lovers. It is

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over this void that a theory of presence is established through the conception of the dual authorship – and this is fully theorised in Underneath the Bough. But what happens when the loss hypothesised in this poem actually occurs? I turn, next, to an unpublished poem from The Wattlefold, written by Bradley in 1914, after Cooper had died, to show how the theoretical space delineated in such a sophisticated manner in Underneath the Bough responds to this rupturing of ‘Michael Field’.80 The absence Michael Field so opposed in Underneath the Bough has now become a reality in Bradley’s life and, if we read the dual authorship literally, it would seem that the means to counter it has disappeared. Yet ‘I am thy charge, thy care!’ (p. 202) initially seems to contain a more thorough textual scripting of the women’s dual authorship than ever before. In this poem, I suggest, we can see a clear inscription of the two women’s sharing of the positions of muse and poet: I am thy charge, thy care! Thou art praying for me, and about my bed, About my ways; but there are things one misses – It is the little cup That I drink up, The cup full of thee, offered every day – I come for it, as birds draw to a brook – It is the reflex of thee, in thy nook, Caught sideways in a mirror as I pray – My precious Heap, My jewel, in the casket of thy sleep. Beloved, it is the little wreath of kisses, I wove about thy head, thy withering hair.

The poem begins with one woman in bed being cared for, and prayed for, by the other. The speaker goes on to say how she misses certain aspects of her relationship with ‘thee’ – this is figured in lines four to seven (an erotic and simultaneously Eucharistic image which echoes the terms in which the women first vowed to devote themselves to each other).81 What happens in the next two lines, however, is crucial. At this point ‘I’ and ‘thou’ appear to change roles, and the rest of the poem inverts the actions of ‘I’ and ‘you’. At the beginning ‘I’ is in bed, receiving care and prayers from ‘thou’. But by the end, ‘I’ is praying while ‘you’ is in bed, asleep, and ‘I’ places kisses about the ‘withering’ hair of ‘you’. It fits with Bradley and Cooper’s stated literary intentions, as well as ‘half-poems’ such as ‘A girl’, to see this poem as representing two voices: ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ change

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positions halfway through, and ‘Thou’ comes into the poem as the speaker. The first half, then, is the voice of one woman, and the second half is the voice of the other woman. We can imagine various scenarios from the women’s lives which would fit this pattern. For example, if the poem is initially written from the viewpoint of Cooper, ill in bed, receiving care and prayers from Bradley, the second half of the poem gives voice to Bradley, weaving a ‘little wreath of kisses’ above Cooper’s head while she is asleep. Poet has become muse, and muse, poet. The idea that subject and object swap positions in this poem is reinforced by the way the poem works around a mirror form, with the ‘reflex’ forming the hinge of the textual mirror. Thus, ‘Thou art praying’ is reflected by ‘I pray’, and ‘my bed’ is reflected by ‘thy sleep’; actions are repeated but the subject and object (‘I’ and ‘thou’) have swapped positions. The mirror at the centre of the poem marks the, otherwise imperceptible, change of narrator, and also emphasises how the two women mirror each other back to one another. They both act as muses, while both being poets. This is a successful renegotiation of the mirror stage which, in Jan Montefiore’s terms, usually governs and distorts the relationship between poet and muse. This strategy does not, like the usual identity confirming relationship, involve a denial of the other as the price of the identity of the poet. This inscription within the poem of a sharing of the authorial subject position between the two women cannot, in 1914 (after Cooper’s death), count as evidence of the practical collaborative writing practice to which Bradley and Cooper made claim. The machinations of this poem present a theoretical conceit or a mode of representing an alternative authority, and not an actual instance of a manuscript being started by one hand and finished by another. The poem is undoubtedly an act of remembering Cooper, but it is also an act of making her present through reinscribing the pattern of their double presence. I suggest the dual authorship became more important, textually, as a strategy for configuring the lyric than as an actual practice of writing. I have already discussed how elegy relies, generically, on the absence of the beloved ‘other’: the act of memorial is one which inscribes and reaffirms the beloved’s absence even as it mourns it. Yet this poem subverts the very structures of poetic memorialising by remembering through an aesthetic which brings back the, now absent, ‘other’ and inscribes her textual presence. The same technique that was used by the women, when both were alive, to represent their dual authorship is now used by Bradley alone as an act of summoning Cooper back poetically. Not only is this

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strategy a way of overcoming identification with the silenced position of the female subject of the lyric, it is also a means of conquering the central dialectic of absence and presence upon which the elegy is even more strongly predicated. In his analysis of In Memoriam, W. David Shaw writes of different kinds of silence in the poem and identifies Hallam’s ‘silent-speaking words’, which are so, ‘not because they are unspeakable, like the thoughts conveyed in the letters to Hallam that Hallam’s father eventually destroyed, but because, like any communication from a ghost, they are inexpressible’. Shaw sees this as the double irony which presents the ‘doubts of uncertainty itself ’.82 This is the dilemma of the elegist, trying to incorporate the dead subject whose words must always exist the other side of silence. Not so, for Katharine Bradley: her elegy revolves around a figuration of presence, not absence. In fact, we must at this point take into account another complicating factor. Cooper’s voice is quite literally present within Bradley’s poem because Bradley incorporates into the lyric a quotation from a diary entry Cooper wrote shortly before she died. On 27 October 1913, Cooper writes in heart-wrenching terms about her bond with Bradley, their tenderness, and her imminent death: It is the early morning of my own love’s birthday. How dear she is to me – how the sweetness & clench of love grow pain & joy as I look at her, touch her, & receive her little wreath of kisses in my withered hair.83

This is one of Cooper’s final eulogies to her lover: it is part of her process of saying goodbye. Yet even after her death Bradley won’t let her go: it is from this entry that Bradley takes the phrase ‘receive her little wreath of kisses in my withered hair’ and treats it as Cooper’s contribution to the poem, working it into the last two lines. How does this posthumous collaboration work? Bradley herself gives something of an explanation in her diary entry for the last day of 1913, shortly after Cooper’s death: Henry, my Beloved, I am with thee again, & beside thee in our work. – I cannot pray for thee, as thou wert a distant thing. Thou dost not remain half the time with me in Paragon, as Proserpina in hell, but half thy self is restored to me and in secret Henry & Michael are one. Sing with me, through me, O my Beloved.84

This passage seems to posit an even more complete unification of their poetic voices after Cooper’s death than before. Her voice, from beyond the grave, is Cooper’s gift; it is that portion of herself, that ‘half thy self ’, which Bradley feels is given to her. It was part of the women’s personal

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mythology that the dead were ‘taken in’ by those who loved them: ‘Ah, how good to have one’s dear ones not outside one any more – but with & of one’s art & life!’, writes Bradley on the death of her sister, and Edith’s mother, Lissie.85 In the poem under examination Cooper does indeed ‘sing through’ her lover as Bradley writes her words – the voices merging and indeterminate. It is precisely in their ‘work’ that Bradley feels still ‘beside thee’: it is the poetry that summons up Cooper’s voice again. This complicates our reading of the poem, and necessitates further re-reading, because voice now appears even less determinate. In this poem, in which everything is ‘reflex’-ive, and in which all possible ways of sharing the poetic voice are imagined, the final lines encode not the usual oscillation of voices, but an actual chorus. Here Cooper’s words from the diary – ‘receive her little wreath of kisses in my withered hair’ – are overlaid with Bradley’s voice, so that subject and object change positions in the quotation: ‘it is the little wreath of kisses, / I wove about thy head, thy withering hair’. Cooper’s words and Bradley’s voice work together here to image lover and loved, active giver and passive recipient, as one at the same time. My reading of ‘I am thy charge, thy care!’ began by tracing what seemed to be an oscillation, or sharing, between two voices, but I think we must end by finding instead an inscription of a true chorus of voices. It seems to be no accident that the duet is a posthumous one. This textual overlaying of voices is born from the spiritual inhabitation, or haunting, described by Bradley above, which allows the two women to unite more closely than they ever could while both alive. My findings from the diaries suggest that the ‘I’ of the poem is, in fact, probably Bradley’s voice throughout: in this scenario the narrator is constant, and single, but she is sometimes acting as the carer, sometimes the cared for. The poem begins with her musings on the fact that Cooper is still, although dead, a presence, a haunting, and a salvation for her, praying for her. Although she still has a sense of Cooper’s spiritual presence, there are more corporeal aspects of their relationship which Bradley misses. It is Cooper’s ghost that Bradley catches a glimpse of in the middle of the poem: ‘It is the reflex of thee, in thy nook, / Caught sideways in a mirror as I pray’. And we know from Cooper’s diary entry that it was Bradley who wove the wreath of kisses about Cooper’s hair. In other words we now need to interpret this poem as displaying a sharing of roles, rather than a swapping of positions, to stress the co-operative, collaborative, nature of the poets’ relationship. Yet, although Bradley occupies the ‘I’ position throughout, she shares it with Cooper, not in the serial, oscillating, fashion proposed before, but by creating a

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true, synchronic, chorus of voices, allowing Cooper to sing through her, and with her. The disagreement between Prins and Blain, noted earlier, posed the question of whether Michael Field’s voice could ever be a chorus or whether it was only ever an oscillation of voices. Close attention to the textual operation of the poetry suggests that a chorus of sorts can be inscribed in the text. This discovery should not discount my previous efforts to read the poem as an inscription of a shared authorship: this poem enables, on its own terms, a reading of serial collaboration. But, for the reader who has access to the full oeuvre of Michael Field’s work, including the diaries, it can also come to represent the synchronic collaboration of chorus. I have no doubt that this poem was designed, out of grief, to inscribe every possible kind of sharing between the two women: both Blain’s series of ‘cunning alterations’, but also, ultimately, Prins’s ‘chorus’. The complex intertextuality within Michael Field’s work (the diaries, letter, plays and poems) allows for a layering of voices that can break the illusion of singleness Blain claims dominates any written text. Blain is no doubt right that the method of composition and the resulting configuration of the textual voice are quite distinct, but instead of interpreting this as a limit on the configuration of lyric voice, I see it as a freeing up of the lyric voice for greater experimentation than was possible in real practice. Michael Field does inscribe textual collaborations which couldn’t possibly have been a reflection of the real practice of dual authorship, and these are most clearly seen in the resurrection of Cooper’s voice after death. The unpublished work of The Wattlefold presents us with an arena in which to test the construction of voice developed in Underneath the Bough. What we see in this analysis of ‘I am thy charge, thy care!’ is that the dual authorship of Michael Field is just as concerned with the relationship of, and influence between, bodies across time as across space. The questions asked by critics about whether the dual authorship consists of a chorus, or a speaking in turn, is essentially a question of synchronic versus diachronic models of speaking. These issues become particularly pronounced in ‘I am thy charge, thy care!’, where concerns with the relationship between the two voices now has to negotiate one voice speaking from beyond the grave. In this poem the concerns with time, history and dual authorship all come to a head as Bradley not only imagines, but, through intertext, effects, a writing in chorus with the past. This sensitive, personal, recovery of voices from the past is analogous to the determined collaboration with past texts, and images, that we see

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particularly in Long Ago, Sight and Song and Underneath the Bough. Michael Field’s work is haunted by Sappho, Botticelli, the Ruba´iya´t, Donne, Shakespeare, and, just as Bradley allowed Cooper to sing through her, the two poets are, in these volumes, trying to absorb the spirit of these past masters. Crucially, they are not mere conduits for this song. They rather aspire to collaborate with these spirits, producing a text that is a truly mutual creation. In Underneath the Bough specifically, the shared song of the Ruba´iya´t provided a context of erotic interchange that helps Bradley and Cooper articulate this textual strategy, but the Metaphysics of Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry was also crucial to figuring presence within the Victorian lyric. The absence at the heart of the Victorian lyric (for the elegy seems to underpin the Victorian lyric in an important way) is not only the absent object of the solipsistic poem; it is also the loss of the past and the gulf between the subject’s present and the past which so obsessed the Victorians. Rowlinson’s argument for the totalising print-lyric which subsumed its lyric past must also be countered by an opposite case for the Victorian lyric subject being effaced by the conventions and traditions into which he or she inserts themselves. Lyric subjecthood is constantly threatened because of the iterative quality of the tradition and the conventional nature of its tropes. Can the nineteenth-century lyric poet ever write within the genre without simultaneously writing himself or herself out of the poem? We see here a competitive struggle (a scenario familiar from Darwin) in which both present and past are doomed to fail and be haunted by anxiety about the other (a scenario familiar from Freud). Underneath the Bough is structured around healing temporal lesions – both local and personal, as well as those operating within large-scale historical narratives. What results is a synchronic relationship with literary history, allowing previous forms to come through and work in tandem with their lyrics, without either party being subsumed by the other. The same is true of the personal healing sought in ‘I am thy charge, thy care!’, in which a chorus with the dead is achieved through a similar haunting. the multiple editions: synchronic and diachronic structures Yet there is a dimension of this volume of poetry which must have proved very unsatisfactory to its authors. Why else did it appear in three separate editions? My near-final task in this chapter is to begin to unravel the motivation for the second two editions of the book, and thus pave

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the way for the concerns I will go on to find at the root of Wild Honey from Various Thyme. Underneath the Bough is unique in Michael Field’s oeuvre in that it was published in three different editions by Bradley and Cooper over the course of five years – each one with a quite different and distinct narrative structure. The first edition, published in 150 copies by George Bell and Sons, in 1893, contained 126 poems. The second edition was published just a little later in the same, year, again by George Bell, but it was not a limited edition. In this ‘revised and decreased’ edition, 72 poems remained the same; 5 new poems were added and 59 were taken out.86 Mary Sturgeon explains how it was not long after the appearance of the first edition that the poets received more probing criticism from friends and ‘confessed their repentance for the defective work by immediately cutting the book to the extent of one-half ’.87 However, ‘Repenting at leisure of their hasty repentance’, writes Sturgeon, ‘they brought out yet another edition, and reinstated many of the poems which they had rejected from number two’.88 This third edition is the American Moscher edition of 1898, which is based on the first edition, but with thirty completely new pieces added. Sturgeon’s explanation, although undoubtedly accurate, does not, I suspect, tell the whole story – especially since the first volume was very well received publicly. I suggest that what we see in the three editions of Underneath the Bough is, in part, a testing out of synchronic and diachronic modes of narration across the volume as a whole, and an inability to find a satisfying ‘story’ for the book. In his persuasive article on Underneath the Bough, Robert Fletcher finds in the first edition a simultaneous presentation of several different tales of desire: maternal and erotic, homosexual and heterosexual. He sees the narrative of the book as a deliberate attempt to work the two tales into an ambiguous whole, revealing ‘a desire to tell and not to tell’.89 This reading is entirely in keeping with the mode of ars erotica that I have traced in this edition, and it is wholly convincing. Yet Fletcher’s decision not to engage with any but the first edition of this volume makes his reading of Bradley and Cooper’s motivations rather partial. Following Mary Sturgeon, Fletcher asserts that in the first edition book three contains the love lyrics between the women. He goes on to suggest that book four reintroduces a heterosexual narrative (as well as keeping in play the homoerotic), to end on a conservative note where ‘I would not be a fugitive’ figures desire between man and woman.90 Yet one of the most noticeable narrative changes in the second edition is the different ending. Finishing with ‘It was deep April’ ties the story much more securely to a

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homoerotic manifesto of ‘poets and lovers’. Many of the key poems Fletcher sees as structuring the double narrative in the first edition are not there in the second. ‘Two lovers came’, which Fletcher reads as the linchpin poem, is taken out. ‘Cowslip Gathering’, another poem identified as managing this transaction between homosexual and heterosexual narratives, is also taken out. (Other poems about paradox and doubleness also disappear, such as ‘She mingled me rue and roses’, which has as its subject the intermingling of the bitter and the sweet.) The four-book structure is also removed from the second edition, giving the whole thing a less epic-narrative structure. The effect is to lose, to a large extent, the interweaving of hetero- and homoerotic narratives, and to lose the possibility of the double narrative and the paradox it sometimes comes to encode. What is gained is a more decisively homoerotic ending – a clearer teleology. The book is more simply organised around a structure of three phases. In the second edition, the first phase is devoted to poems linking love and death (such as the opening poem, ‘Mortal, if thou art beloved’ (p. 1), then ‘Sometimes I do despatch my heart, (p. 6), or ‘Death, men say, is like a sea’ (p. 5)), and some highly metaphorical poems about erotic desire (‘Say, if a gallant rose my bower doth scale’ (p. 12); ‘Through hazels and apples’ (p. 13)). This section charts an anxiety about desire and a need to heavily encode that desire. In ‘Ah, Eros does not always smite’ (p. 7), we see a poem meditating on the friendship that can sometimes more appropriately arise from the strike of Cupid’s arrow. The second phase sees the entry of the desired male subject and the use of distinctly heteroerotic relationships. This phase is trailed in advance by the coy poem ‘Ah me, if I grew sweet to man’ (p. 25), but the cluster of these poems really occurs between pages 50 and 70. The poems featuring a distinctly heterosexual framework of desire include: ‘A Death-Bed’, featuring a husband and wife scenario (p. 50); ‘A Ballad’ (p. 53–6); ‘Leda was wearied of her state, the crown’ (p. 57–8); and ‘Noontide Sleep’ (p. 66). The following poems feature a male beloved: ‘I live in the world for his sake’ (p. 61) and ‘Across a gaudy room’ (p. 62–3). The end of this section of the collection is marked by a pair of poems which make a transition into the third and final phase, in which love between women, of maternal and erotic varieties, is celebrated. The first of the pair – ‘We meet. I cannot look up; I hear’ (p. 70) – describes a charged encounter with a pair of male eyes from which the narrator derives power and sustenance. The second – ‘I have found her power!’ (p. 71) – inscribes a similar, and equally erotically charged encounter with a female gaze: ‘I have found her

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power! / From her roving eyes / Just a gift of blue, / That away she threw’. This transition from the erotically charged male gaze to an erotically charged female gaze marks a decisive shift towards the celebration of a female lover. As well as poems such as ‘The lady I have vowed to paint’ (p. 75) and ‘My love is like a lovely shepherdess’ (p. 92–3), the well-known poems of love between the two women also occur here: ‘A girl’ (p. 88), ‘A gray mob-cap and a girl’s’ (p. 98) – describing Bradley’s maternal feelings towards Cooper when she was seriously ill with fever – and, finally, ‘It was deep April, and the morn’ (p. 100). The volume progresses from uncertainty to a normative heterosexual phase, and then on into a celebratory homoerotic landscape. In this second edition the double narrative has been replaced with a diachronic structure where development is made sequentially from one phase to another. When Bradley and Cooper cut poems from the first edition they also changed the order of those remaining: this is no accidental new configuration of the narrative, but another careful remoulding of the line. Even if we assume that the reasons for decreasing the volume were simply those enumerated by Mary Sturgeon, there is no doubt that in the revised version Bradley and Cooper also chose to present a strategically different narrative to its readership. Fletcher’s reading of the instability of the first edition is based around the thought that it narrates the story of Bradley and Cooper’s desire in an unexpected way (why, he wonders, do the authors not present an ending which reflects the supremacy of the homoerotic attachment which structured the women’s lives?). What he doesn’t see is that this second edition conforms far more clearly to his expectation. The two different types of narrative constructed in these two editions reveal a central tension in Bradley and Cooper’s ordering and arrangement of the book of poems: the first edition represents a synchronic erotic narrative, while the second replaced it with one of a diachronic structure. I suggest that the rapid issue of both editions indicates a desire to have both structures: a desire both to tell a strong linear biographical narrative tale, and to undercut the clear dualisms around which such a story appears to revolve when it is told. In Underneath the Bough they do not seem to be able to meet these two requirements satisfactorily in one edition, but the double impetus can be traced over the first two editions. This dilemma is the result of a striving to combine the forms of art and biography: to make a hard and gem-like (and synchronic) paradox out of temporally diachronic personal narrative. Bradley and Cooper wanted Underneath the Bough to tell a history, but also to adopt an attitude to that history which turned straight line into

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circle and narrative into paradox: this, it seems, produces a truer reflection of their lived experience, and it also satisfies their artistic imperative. The third edition of the book, produced five years later, is for the American market. The preface to this edition declares that Bradley and Cooper had, in the UK, felt themselves underappreciated, and were forced to work for a future generation who had yet to appear but who they believed would give them their due. Those in America, by contrast, were deserving of this book, of lyrics to which had been added ‘such new songs as I count my sweetest to those of ‘‘The Old World Series’’’. In effect this book is a return to the first edition (complete now with divisions into song ‘books’), enlarged with new work. Books one and two are very much the same as in the first edition. The changes to book three, although numerous, do not change the tone of this book, which is still by and large a paean of love between the two women (their love for each other appears to have been such fertile poetic inspiration that there was always plenty of new material here). Book four consists entirely of lyrics already published in book four of the first edition, but it is much abbreviated, with many other lyrics from this book appearing now in a new book five, which is augmented by numerous additional poems. The new poems in book five leave it depicting a real mix of relationships. Like the end of the first edition, this volume leaves us with poems which very roughly alternate infatuation with male and female lovers: from ‘The lady I have vowed to paint’ (p. 88), to the male subject of ‘We meet. I cannot look up; I hear’ (p. 89), to the seductive woman in ‘I have found her power!’ (p. 89), to the strange passion of the man sailing into the narrator’s life in ‘Touching the Land’ (p. 92). The clear line of the second edition was eventually rejected, then, and Bradley and Cooper go back to a more complex and ambiguous third edition. The third, enlarged, volume restores many of the lost poems and returns to a more synchronic narrative structure. Yet this edition, in its return to the structure of the first, doesn’t seem to solve the problem posed in the forms of editions one and two: it doesn’t seem to reconcile diachronic (biographical, in this case) and synchronic (artistic and particularly aestheticist) structures satisfactorily. However, it is significant that this volume has a striking new ending. A poem not previously contained within Underneath the Bough, ‘Renewal’ (p. 93), which also appears in Wild Honey, presents the reader with a joyous vision of a phoenix arising from the flames and is surely, in part, a statement about the resurrection of this volume as it was first conceived. Yet, because this statement occurs at the end of the volume, it suggests that this rebirth is

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part of an ongoing cycle of renewal. This continuous cycle of death and rebirth might be a fitting comment on a volume which rapidly appeared in three different versions, but it also glosses the relationship of this volume with history, implying an intimate cyclical connection with texts, such as the Ruba´iya´t, which are given voice through this book. Because the poem is included again in Wild Honey, it also provides a link with the next published volume of poems and suggests more mini textual cycles as well as the large-scale historical cycles within which Bradley and Cooper want to situate themselves. Most significantly, this new ending affirms the importance to the volume of time, history and cyclical patterns, taking the reader away, ultimately, from hetero- or homoerotic romance (although both are prominent still in the volume as a whole), to see the importance of the textual-temporal patterns that structure such narratives. The phoenix signifies a moment of simultaneous death and rebirth, which might represent the synchronicity that structures the erotic narrative of the volume as a whole. Through its new ending (which implicitly acknowledges Carlyle’s work on history and biography, as demonstrated in Chapter 1), this third edition declares its concern with patterns of time even more explicitly than the previous two. Its appearance in Moscher’s (new world) ‘The Old World Series’ is highlighted in Michael Field’s preface, as if to emphasise further the book’s interest in old versus new, and the potential for the merging of the two. It was not until fifteen years after the first edition of Underneath the Bough that Wild Honey was published, and it becomes clear that in the structure and arrangement of this later volume Bradley and Cooper have finally found a way of combining a clear biographical teleology with a poetics of paradox and double narrative (the desire both to tell and not to tell). This is what Jonathan Freedman describes when, writing of the impulse within aestheticist history towards both synchronicity and the diachronic, he writes that aestheticism ‘works, in its habitual fashion to mold the two into a complicated and ultimately contradictory aesthetic whole’.91 It is just such a structure that I trace in my next chapter.

dedicated : singing solo Before I turn to Wild Honey, one further issue must be addressed. In spite of Michael Field’s dual authorship, it is possible to separate the work of Bradley and Cooper and read them as rather different poets. Indeed, Cooper refers in the diaries to ‘Michael’s poems to me’, listing ‘Old

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Ivories’ (Wild Honey), ‘The dear temptations of her face’ (titled ‘Vale!’ in Wild Honey), ‘Atthis, my darling’ (Long Ago), ‘Palimpsest’ (‘the loveliest nocturne of Love ever created’, Wild Honey) and ‘A girl’ (Underneath the Bough), and showing that some poems were considered the products of quite individual voices, no matter how much they proclaimed the duality of authorship in general.92 The volume Dedicated gives a good opportunity to pursue this line of enquiry, as it was published by Bradley (and dedicated to Cooper) in 1914 after Cooper’s death but is a collection of unpublished poems written by Cooper alone between 1899 and 1902.93 Although not published until 1914, a volume ‘dedicated’ to Bradley (possibly the same one) was being prepared by Cooper towards the end of 1900.94 What was eventually published by Bradley was probably an extended version of Cooper’s earlier conception. The single authorship of this volume (excepting the final poem, which was added by Bradley), along with its identity as a posthumous collection, renders me reluctant to include it as one of the primary volumes of verse in the Michael Field canon. Yet it can usefully be used to comment on what happens when these women write alone. Furthermore, this volume bridges the long gap between Underneath the Bough and the publication of Wild Honey because almost all of the poems were written during this period (as I will explain in my next chapter, the problem the women were facing at this point wasn’t the desertion of the muse, but the inability to solve problems of the narrative of the book of verse). Dedicated is entirely different in texture from the other volumes published under the ‘Michael Field’ name. It contains many long narrative poems, almost exclusively of mythological subjects and of an esoteric, depersonalised, nature. This was the rather abstract and classical style towards which Cooper leaned when left to her own devices. Bradley’s style, as can be seen from ‘I am thy charge, thy care!’ quoted above, tends much more towards the earthy, the personal and the domestic. Bradley herself defines this difference in poetic style when she berates a correspondent (probably Amy, given that it seems a continuation of a letter to ‘Little One’) for thinking that ‘Cherry Song’, from Wild Honey, was written by Cooper: ‘But of course Cherry Song – to the last stone [–] is the Horse’s! [another of Bradley’s nicknames] How could you think that low, & very earthly note, was that of the Divine one’.95 Charles Ricketts identifies a similar difference when, comparing Cooper’s religious poetry with Bradley’s, he wrote that ‘In Henry’s book, the texture is often of a fine quality. There are countless beautiful lines and beautiful thoughts, but to the layman there is a sense of length and over-tenseness. You are

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much more with the Naughty Virgins who ran after cuckoos and red currants. I like your poem about them, ‘‘Too Late’’ ’.96 Yet, Bradley’s work is no less poetically intricate or valuable than Cooper’s, and it really does seem to be the case that the best poetry results from a combination of both styles. Bradley brings something of the strain and sincerity of real life which, when fused with Cooper’s stylised and abstract verse, creates a lyric environment that is both intimate and transcendent. Indeed, Bradley ends the volume with her own offering, which dwells on the women’s ‘fellowship’, in a poem of that title: I In the old accents I will sing, my Glory, my Delight, In the old accents, tipped with flame, before we knew the right, True way of singing with reserve. O Love, with pagan might, II White in our steeds, and white too in our armour let us ride, Immortal, white, triumphing, flashing downward side by side To where our friends, the Argonauts, are fighting with the tide. III Let us draw calm to them, Beloved, the souls on heavenly voyage bound, Saluting as one presence. Great disaster were it found, If one with half-fed lambency should halt and flicker round. IV O friends so fondly loving, so beloved, look up to us, In constellation breaking on your errand, prosperous, O Argonauts! . . . . . . . . Now, faded from their sight, We cling and joy. It was thy intercession gave me right My Fellow, to this fellowship. My Glory, my Delight! (pp. 123–4)

Here she announces how, in 1914, she is retuning to the old pagan voice in which to sing of her love. Here the women are seen as two warriors: saluting the Argonauts as ‘one presence’, they come ‘in constellation’. The disastrous secret the Argonauts might notice, ‘If one with half-fed lambency should halt and flicker round’, is presumably connected with the presence amongst them of Atalanta, daughter of Schoeneus, disguised in a man’s dress.97 For Bradley and Cooper it was not only their gender they had to hide, but also their number. They salute the Argonauts ‘as one

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presence’, maintaining their disguise as one man. Out of sight of the Argonauts, they cling to one another with joy and celebrate their fellowship. In this poem we see Bradley continuing her niece’s classical poetic theme, but adding a personal conceit which softens the abstraction of its style. The ‘singing together’ which is the structuring theme of Underneath the Bough was not only a personal imperative and an expression of an erotic union, but also a challenging textual conceit and, most simply, a successful poetic formula.

chapter 5

Wild Honey from Various Thyme: apian aestheticism and the lyric book collection

The fin de sie`cle is notorious for its fascination with the beautifully presented book, and one of the glorious aspects of reading Michael Field’s poetry is the contact with the book objects themselves. Whether it’s the vellum cover of Long Ago, the russet suede cover of Whym Chow: Flame of Love or the gilt-embossed green silk of Wild Honey, there is overwhelming evidence that the presentation of their poetry was of the utmost importance to Bradley and Cooper. Any study of the poetry must engage, at some point, with the book object: the qualities of its physical production (the cover design, for example), as well as its production history and the arrangement of poems within the collection.1 All of these aspects inform my study of a volume usually neglected by critics: Wild Honey from Various Thyme. A glance at this book will explain immediately why I have married this approach with this particular text. The cover design is striking, with a dark-green silk embossed with a simple repeated gilt bee and honeycomb woodcut, designed by Charles Ricketts, with a corresponding motif of bees and flower-bells on the spine. Bradley and Cooper’s letters to Charles Ricketts and John Gray, as well as their diaries, are full of their plans for this book, and particularly its name and cover. The design was completed not without some trouble. Ricketts had great difficulty drawing the bees that Bradley and Cooper so desired: Your request for a book cover also fills me with grief and consternation [ . . . .] Not only do I object to drawing all the little cells in the honeycomb (the proper word is sells) but I find that I must go to the Natural History Museum to ascertain what a bee looks like. So far I can only draw what looks like butterflies or wasps.2 130

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This, it seems, was not originally what Bradley and Cooper had in mind. They had asked Ricketts to design a cover for them after seeing his cover for D. G. Rossetti’s Poems (1870): Seriously, dear Painter, draw me your wildest bees, in swarm, or settling on St John, or in stormy wrangle with locusts, or meditating with deliberate feet the camel hair. O draw me the dear dead bumblebee – eternal among the years – that you gave me in another century than this.3

What Ricketts eventually produced could not be further from an angry swarm around St John: it looked more like the stylised art that was being rediscovered in the excavation of classical sites. In this negotiation over the cover design we can already find the two central themes of my chapter. The issues of the commodification of literature raised by this opulent presentation of text, and the relationship between text and cover design (and writer and book designer), will be addressed in the second half of this chapter. But in the first I will turn to issues which connect more directly and obviously with the internal construction of the narrative of this lyric collection. In the negotiation between Ricketts and Michael Field over the cover design we also see the potential for the bee image to be pulled between significations of Michael Field’s new Catholic beliefs and emblems of their old pagan world. Much of Bradley and Cooper’s interaction with Ricketts around the design of the book is loaded with the significance of the tension, and unity, between the pagan and the Christian: Michael Field’s life in the old century and the author’s reconfigured identity in the new. Bradley’s reference to the ‘dear dead bumblebee - eternal among the years - that you gave me in another century than this’ recalls the bunch of flowers with which Ricketts had presented them, which deliberately contained a dead bee.4 That the women stress the location of this event in an earlier century indicates clearly the role the bee plays in linking together what they conceive of as two very different and distant, temporal worlds. That the quest for a bee took Ricketts to the Natural History Museum also seems appropriate to this sense of the bee as occupying a mediating role in history, and ensuring simultaneous diachronic and synchronic structures for the volume. Just as the museum is able to run several different ages in parallel, so too the bees manage to take through the volume several different meanings which inhabit every poem simultaneously. In the first half of this chapter I will trace, through the construction of Wild Honey, this idea of the book as an object that reflects, within its very

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arrangement, the concerns with time and history that came to a head over the turn of the century. The title, Wild Honey from Various Thyme, was almost certainly a corrupted reference to Sicily (the bread basket of Rome, before it conquered Spain and North Africa), and its famous honey gathered from bees fed on wild thyme. That, for Michael Field, it is the honey that is ‘wild’ rather than the thyme, is a crafty way of conveying the sense of ‘mad’ or ‘boiling’ honey which Bradley told John Gray was contained within the volume. This book contains passionate honey – or a statement of the intense desire the women had for one another and for others. Once they have shifted the adjective ‘wild’ to partner ‘honey’ instead of ‘thyme’, they give us instead ‘various thyme’. In a pun on ‘various time’, Bradley and Cooper gesture towards the historical juxtaposition – and tension – which brings us in this volume poems from Michael Field’s pagan past as well as poems from their new religious era: influences from the classical, archaeological past, in tandem with Michael Field’s new sense of modernity. This playful title tells us clearly, if we care to look, that this book is a turning point, a crashing together of the temporal tectonic plates of history (at least in individual history), and a passionate response to it which tries to find a harmonious accommodation between past and present bringing ‘various time’ together in the one volume. In this chapter as a whole, I identify what I call Michael Field’s ‘Apian Aestheticism’: a distinctively fin-de-sie`cle aesthetic worked out through the image of the bee which holds pagan and Catholic, aesthetic and economic, in a fine balance, reflecting a fetishistic desire to have it all. ‘Apian Aestheticism’ is a strategy which represents a culmination of Bradley and Cooper’s attempts to deal with certain concerns in their poetic output up to this point. It is a way of resolving potential contradictions within their life and work which threatened the artistic unity and form of the poetry. The bee discourse frames the book and enables it to provide the most comprehensive solution to Michael Field’s lifelong artistic challenge: the attempt to hold multiple terms (and unreconcilable aspects of their lives) in a fine suspension that both recognises opposition while creating apparent harmony and reconciliation. It is through these oppositions that Wild Honey can be seen to be enmeshed in the paradoxes of the turn of the century out of which modern literature was born. As one might expect with Michael Field, the aesthetic of Wild Honey is powered by desire, of a manifold, heteroand homoerotic, nature – a significance also carried at all times by the bee.

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the narrative structure of the lyric collection: pagan bees and christian bees Wild Honey from Various Thyme was published in 1908 after ‘a whole silent decade’,5 and was received well by critics who celebrated it as ‘one of the most delightful books that the last ten years have given us, and should be read by every lover of poetry’.6 The diaries show that Bradley and Cooper conceived of this volume, and were writing poems for it, as soon as Underneath the Bough was published in 1893 – and this writing continued prolifically throughout this period. Yet Wild Honey did not appear until fifteen years later, in 1908. Granted, Michael Field published two other versions of Underneath the Bough in that period (1893 and 1898), but, given how prolific Bradley and Cooper were during this period, it is surprising that they didn’t publish a new volume sooner. The publishing gap was, I have no doubt, a result partly of the struggle to resolve the problem of narrative encountered in Underneath the Bough which I described in my previous chapter. Wild Honey is a great aesthetic achievement, born of long silence and a desire both to tell a biographical narrative while presenting volumes which were concurrent as well as progressive in their structure. I suggest it was this working on arrangement, construction and narrative which took the time, not the writing of individual poems. It is in this volume that Michael Field most comprehensively solves the problem, managing simultaneously to organise the collection with synchronic and diachronic structures. Questions of narrative and history were more pressing than ever when Bradley and Cooper came to write Wild Honey. The turn of the century – an event centrally positioned within the period of time during which Wild Honey was written - had intensified these concerns, and its effects, which were felt by Michael Field long before 1899, cannot be separated from the momentous period of change experienced by Bradley and Cooper within the fifteen years they were writing the volume. Their transition from a pagan to a Catholic phase of personal history, and their entry into the Roman Catholic Church in 1907, was closely connected with the death of their third beloved pet dog, Whym Chow, in 1906. The chow had signified for them their pagan sensuality, and his demise drew that era to a close. This moment seems inevitably connected with the continuing sense of threat to homosexuals who were brought to new visibility by various events at the turn of the century, and also the turn of the century itself: an event not to be underestimated in the women’s lives, as I have argued already, in relation to the diaries, in Chapter 1. There is

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no doubt that Bradley and Cooper self-consciously engaged with the movement from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. The women seem to have deliberately styled themselves as of the new world. As early as 1892 they announce that Tennyson’s funeral represented for them the end of the Victorian era: the Victorian era is ‘an epoch already yesterday’. They disown the Victorian age and proclaim: it is for us, England’s living & yet unspent poets to make all things new. We are for the morning – the nineteenth century thinks it has no poets – nothing to lose – verily it has nothing: for we are not of it – we shake the dust of our feet from it, & pass on into the 20th century.7

The dust of archaeology, the dust of the past, is shaken from their feet as they move into the new century and swear their allegiance to the modern. Even in 1892, then, Michael Field is claiming to ‘make all things new’. But this does not mean that Michael Field has a confident manifesto of the new. The poets are rather feeling their way forward in the dark. In 1893 Cooper writes in the journal: ‘I still do not [insert] yet [end insert] realise where modernity is taking me; I am moving with it as if down a stream, not using it enough as a [insert] for [end insert] a motive force like a mill wheel water fall turning a mill’.8 Again, in the 1894 journal, they feel ‘in the midst of conflict, & all winter I’ve been in the state of Keats’ Lamia when she was changing from a serpent into a human being – a state of torrid transition. I don’t know what I am or what I shall become. The Modern’. The frustration of this state of flux is clearly shown in the appended comment: ‘I wish I could get my change over, for it’s not pleasant, or, more positively speaking, it’s almost unendurable – a mortal strife’.9 Talk of ‘modernism’ in the diaries refers to theological, not literary, modernism,10 and the desire to write in a ‘modern’ fashion cannot be assimilated with the particular style we now call literary modernism, either.11 The ‘modern’ seems to be, above all else, the result of a historical dynamic that has been gaining momentum over the course of the nineteenth century and that sees the turn of the century as a gateway to the new. Bradley and Cooper believed that ‘modernity reaches to all facts & includes them: classic antiquity ignored many; but the new art & literature is great enough to bear all truth’.12 Stepping over the temporal boundary was in itself as traumatic a transition as was their religious conversion a few years later, and the two were not unrelated. As described in Chapter 1, Bradley and Cooper’s life narratives show an attempt to make sense of their position as one in between the old century

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and the new; the pagan and the Catholic; their sexual identity and their religious identity; homoeroticism and heteroeroticism. They self-consciously existed on these fault-lines within their personal history, and there are close connections between these structures and the large-scale tensions which were thought to shape global history at this time. Wild Honey, more than any other volume, emblematises this process. Indeed it is the only book which contains both wild pagan poetry, and some new overtly religious poetry. It is clear that in this volume Michael Field are keen to unite the binaries which have structured their past decade and to find a way forward which renounces nothing. On the eve of 1901, Bradley and Cooper celebrate the end of the century by dining with Ricketts and Shannon. Commenting on this event afterwards in their diary, they declare that while ‘Shannon asserts that he belongs to the new century & savours the opportunities it gives him: the Fairyman [Ricketts] declares he remains with Beethoven’; they, on the other hand, ‘protest that we trust to unite two centuries in our work’.13 Every one of Michael Field’s lyric volumes has a rationale behind it (more obvious, perhaps, in the case of Sight and Song and Long Ago, but equally true of Underneath the Bough – the ‘song book’). I propose that the rationale behind Wild Honey was their transition to ‘the modern’. When Bradley and Cooper first started thinking about this volume in 1893, they characterised themselves as ‘the knights of the modern’.14 Here they reflect that they sometimes think they should call the book ‘The Call of Years’ - a title which again stresses the temporal concerns of the volume - but they discard it because they are still of the future rather than the past (‘a single tooth between us might justify us in adopting the beautiful phrase’).15 This book, reaching out to embrace the future, is primarily about being on the edge, between one thing and another; it is their comment on the turning of the century as much as it is a reflection on the personal changes they underwent during this fifteen-year period. Ordering and arrangement still mattered as much, if not more, with Wild Honey as with Underneath the Bough. In a letter to Ricketts, copied into the diary by Cooper, Bradley stresses Cooper’s careful attention to the ordering and arrangement of this volume: And, Painter, remember! This book is Henry’s; what is excellent in its ordering & distribution is Henry’s. Attribute also to Henry all that’s comfortable in the art; kindly also attribute to Henry all that you do not approve in the range or chequer of the emotions.16

I suggest that the contours of this volume, so carefully shaped by Cooper, record the story of momentous transition and the specific dialectics that

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structured that past fifteen years. Cooper’s necessarily thwarted love for Berenson, and Bradley’s love for Ricketts which almost equals it in passion, the women’s ardent homoerotic love for each other, the death of their dog and their subsequent conversion from pagan Sapphic lovers to Catholic brides of Christ, as well as the turn of the century itself, are all limned in the very physical arrangement of the book. However, the teleological movement is not allowed to dominate the narrative, as they insist on seeing both terms of every binary as existing within each other. It seems that the only way of making sense of such a decade of momentous transition within their poetry is through their highly developed poetics of paradox and double narrative. The narrative reconciliation between homoerotic and heteroerotic, pagan and Christian, nineteenth and twentieth century, is enabled in this volume by the multivalency of bees which manage to harmonise binaries in peculiarly aesthetic fashion. In this way the bees allow Michael Field to use the kind of biographical narrative structure found in the second edition of Underneath the Bough while simultaneously undercutting it with a circular motion which continually ties one thing back into its opposite (something very similar to the structure Fletcher traces in the first edition of Underneath the Bough). First, it is necessary to outline the biographical structure. Earl Miner writes that ‘We must find the narrative element of collections, if we are to find it at all, in the principles that allow us to integrate in satisfying ways integers otherwise separable’.17 In this case those principles are the biographical ones which Neil Fraistat claims allow poets to ‘literally ‘‘publicize’’ themselves in their books, attempting to shape a public identity through the process of selection and arrangement’.18 Starting with ‘Pan Asleep’ (which imagines Pan’s contented, honey-sweetened, sleep as an image of retreat from the horror of the world) and ending with ‘Good Friday’ (where this time it is in the crucifix that the poets find refuge from the appalling world), the volume takes us from pagan to Catholic. This is something recognised by a reviewer whose notice they copied into the diary, who saw a volume varied in theme (and certainly concerned with romance) but which ultimately depicts ‘the encroachment & eventual power of Faith’.19 Even though the diaries reveal that the poems in this volume are not presented in the order in which they were written, they do seem to be organised in a structure which aims to manufacture a representation of their life narrative. This comes as no surprise given the highly crafted life of Michael Field which is presented to us in the diaries. Wild Honey presents the reader with two long sections of poems at either end of the book, with three shorter sections in between: ‘Egyptian

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Sonnets’, then ‘Mane et Vespere’, then ‘Royal Sonnets’. The first long section is untitled, but the final long section is entitled ‘The Longer Allegiance’. The first long section seems to represent the life of the old century by and large, with no Christian themes. Over the course of the next three shorter sections, a change takes place. First ‘Egyptian Sonnets’ also seems to represent the historical orientation of volumes such as Long Ago. ‘Mane et Vespere’ (morning and evening) represents the simultaneous looking backward and forward of this transition part of the volume, and contains a key point for the whole structure in the form of ‘Renewal’ (p. 120). ‘Renewal’ signals a rebirth and a turning point. ‘Royal Sonnets’ contains biblical references and allusions to old age – balancing the ancient history of ‘Egyptian sonnets’ with a sense of personal history and the ageing process, as well as counterposing the ancient world of other gods with a growing Christian significance. ‘The Longer Allegiance’ announces the new faith and contains the poem ‘A Palimpsest’ (p. 180), which confirms the narrative (inaugurated earlier by ‘Renewal’) of conflict and reconciliation between old and new. It also contains a block of poems in honour of the chow dog, bringing into the narrative one of the most important symbolic representatives of their conversion. The volume balances around a middle point, then, the pagan and the Christian: the nineteenth- and the twentieth-century incarnation of Michael Field. The progression I am tracing is not a steady one: the final section contains some Bacchic poems, and the structure I trace does not revolve around neat divisions, but a more ‘realistic’ narrative of uneven movement from the dominance of one thing to the ‘encroachment’ of the other. Inside this large-scale structure, that long, pagan, first section is structured on a more detailed level. The pairing of poems is often used to set up the paradoxically reconciled oppositions which also govern the overall structure of the volume. We see, for example, ‘Feeding of Apollo’ (p. 53) and ‘Feeding of Bacchus’ (p. 54) next to each other, setting up a resonance with Nietzsche’s opposition but drawing between them more common ground than difference. ‘Penetration’ (p. 13) and ‘Onycha’ (p. 14) are, I will later suggest, paired for their resonating silence. Moreover, the sexual tensions so apparent in Underneath the Bough continue into this volume with the careful pairing of poems such as ‘What is Thy belove´d’ (p. 27) and ‘Cherry Song’ (p. 28). The former is an awkward poem describing a male beloved. The comparisons made ostensibly to celebrate his fine qualities are at best ambiguous (to have breath like that of a camel feeding on Myrrh is at best an image of unpleasantness masked). The poem’s juxtaposition with ‘Cherry Song’,

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with its easy sensuality and feminine erotic insignia (resonating particularly with Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’), seems to be designed to highlight two very different kinds of desire. Narratives of homoerotic and heteroerotic desire were still playing a large part in Bradley and Cooper’s lives in 1895, when Cooper’s infatuation with Berenson was at its height – but was awkwardly unrequited – and in 1903–04, when Bradley’s feelings for Ricketts were at their peak. The juxtaposition between these two poems might gesture towards these tensions, but it is more explicitly a contrast between the satirisable reality of love and an idealised vision: ‘Cherry Song’ is a utopian dream which did not happen – ‘Our love hath never mad presumptuous sally, / It has still feet’.20 George Bornstein has written persuasively about the importance of poem pairing in the organisation of Robert Browning’s volumes, and he also gives evidence for this being a recognised way of reading Browning’s lyric volumes as early as 1842.21 This I suggest is something Michael Field learned from their mentor. It is certainly an important structuring feature of this book. Within these pairings, poems are put in contexts which seem designed to keep them unstable: binaries are established but also questioned by the structures used to take them through the volume. Fraistat believes that poets ‘can supplant or destabilize the meaning of one poem by that of others, freeing the reader to pursue any number of interpretative paths’.22 My suggestion here is that Bradley and Cooper ensure the paradoxical conceit of the volume by their handling of its form, both in the detail and in the overall narrative of the book. It is, however, bees which ultimately unify the diverse elements in this volume, providing a form of throughcomposition, a synchronicity which binds together the diachronic phases of the biographical narrative and the opposing terms of the binaries. The bees appear all the way through the volume, as well as framing it, turning the linear narrative into a complex web of double narrative and paradox. Bees draw attention to issues that we must attend to in considering Michael Field’s negotiation of ideas of global and personal history. They act as markers, buzzing around points of tension in Bradley and Cooper’s conception of, and construction of, Michael Field’s history. Indeed Katharine’s own poetic life began with the bee, and it seems to have framed her conception of her own poetic identity. She tells us this story in the 1899 journal, sticking in a short verse written in her own earlier hand: Thou little thinkst thou industrious bee That thy store of honey it is for me

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So when we give a mite of love We little think how its stord [sic] above.

She writes alongside it: ‘From this first scribbled childish verse to Anna Ruina the way is long. With this bee-verse my poet-life began’.23 It is particularly significant that she comes back to this image, and her first ‘bee-verse’, at the very turn of the century. The bee is particularly apparent in the work of Michael Field as a marker of tension around transition. To indicate the importance of the bee briefly, I want to first point to ‘Cowslip-Gathering’ (Underneath the Bough, pp. 67–8), published in 1893. This poem problematises Bradley and Cooper’s much-vaunted dual authorship with the proclamation that ‘Twain cannot mingle’ and that a perfect marriage must involve trinity rather than duality. While one can see this trinity as presaging the later Christian configuration, in this poem the threesome is still resolutely pagan. Nature, here, is the third party of the trinity which enables the marriage of the two women; but, more specifically, it is the bee who weds them. Led, by nature, to a ‘marshy nook’, they are left there to pluck cowslip ‘In the moist quiet, till the rich content / Of the bee humming in the cherry-trees / Filled us; in one our very being blent’. The bee, here, is the point of reconciliation of the two women; the third figure in the Trinity which joins the other two. It is in the following volume, however, that the bee image comes into its own. The correspondence between Bradley and John Gray around the time of publication of Wild Honey is, almost obsessively, full of references to the book, which all show the importance of bees and honey to its conception. Debate is particularly strong surrounding the name of the volume. It seems that Gray suggested that it be called The Honey Book, as we have Bradley’s reply: ‘The Honey book is a dear name – I like it better than any of them’.24 That she writes so often of it to Gray should not disguise the fact that the book is half in tension with her new Catholic faith – half a paean to her old pagan existence – as well as forming some kind of a bridge into her new life as a Catholic. Later on she writes to Gray: – You asked about the Honey-book – I have a new name for it – ‘Mad Honey’ – given by me, with a little shake of the head, as I read the proofs. If you [?]should [?]see – it is ‘boiling’ honey. But you shall never see it [ . . . .] You, I warn against it. Go you & do not likewise!!!! I am afraid it will be ‘painful case’, & may lead to wicked, indeed villainous acts of evasion!!!25

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Certainly, then, the book is a part of her new religious life with Gray, but it is also a vestige of her wild paganism. In the huge bundle of letters between Bradley and Gray which are kept in the National Library of Scotland, it is interesting how often Bradley’s talk of the ‘Honey-book’ is promptly followed up with talk of, specifically, a breviary. This can’t help but associate Wild Honey, at some level, with Huysmans’ A Rebours: Arthur Symons’ ‘breviary of the Decadence’.26 Clearly bees become important in Michael Field’s personal mythology at this time, and the hive is partly a personal ‘archive’ of poems from a fifteenyear period in which Bradley and Cooper’s lives changed dramatically. But we must also recognise that bees bring into this volume a specific set of meanings which allow them to carry, as double narratives, the binaries Michael Field are concerned with here. Flowers, pollen and poetry have always had a distinctive relationship which can be traced in the very etymology of ‘anthology’. Within such a flower collection as Wild Honey, the bee has a unifying role, cross-pollinating and holding the collection together. The bee and the breviary can go hand in hand because bees carried with them the Christian significations which had recently become important to Bradley and Cooper – it is not surprising that they imagined St John and the swarm of bees for the cover. John the Baptist prepared the way for Christ: his was the voice crying in the wilderness, the visionary who foretold the first coming.27 John’s visionary prophecy in the wilderness, induced by a diet of locusts and wild honey, is clearly the central allusion of the title and Michael Field’s epigraph to the book. The book is dedicated to John (‘take thou our gifts’) and the epigraph reveals how the book has been inspired by an imaginary journey with John in the desert in order for Michael Field to reach the same state of mystical ‘Vision’; now the two women leave John with the offering of the fruit of their vision fed on wild honey: Wild was the honey thou did’st eat; The rocks and the free bees Entombed thy honeycomb. Take thou our gifts, take these: No more in thy retreat Do we attend thine ears; no more we roam Or taste of desert food; We have beheld thy Vision on the road.

This imaginary identification with John the Baptist gives Michael Field – and more particularly Wild Honey – the status of a prologue to the second

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coming.28 Like Yeats, Michael Field face the twentieth century with a sense of mixed doom and awe, and they feel their voice is that of the prophet in the wilderness. The honey of the rock eaten by John and invoked in the first three lines of the epigraph invokes the natural bounty of God’s world. Bees settle in the crevices of rocks in the desert and make their honeycomb there, so the ‘sucking of honey out of the rock’ is not a miraculous transubstantiation, although it does symbolise the miracle of God’s bounty.29 This book of wild honey is, for Bradley and Cooper, a similar quasi-miraculous sweetness, although the substance change invoked here is that between book and honey: the ingesting of the book, rather than the sucking of the rock, will inspire the reader’s divine vision. Indeed, the gift of prophecy is figured within the Bible itself as an eating of the book which tastes like honey in the mouth (just as one devours the Logos, the Word of God, in the sacraments). With connotations of John the Divine taking in the little book from the angel in Revelations (‘it was in my mouth sweet as honey’)30 before going to prophesy before many peoples, and Ezekiel eating the scroll which ‘was in my mouth as honey for sweetness’,31 Michael Field’s ‘Honey-book’ claims for itself the ability to induce vision and prophecy when tasted. So, Michael Field both share in John’s prophetic visions born of a diet of wild honey, but they also figure themselves as higher divinity – as the creators of the ‘Honey-book’ which when handed down and ingested will allow its readers/digesters to become prophets of the second coming.32 Yet, by no accident, the bee was also revered and important in ancient, and pagan, Greece. The ancient Greek poets were often named ‘bees’: Sophocles, the ‘attic bee’; Sappho, the ‘Pierian bee’. Bees, because of their noise and their ability to produce sweetness, are themselves an analogy for the poet, as Michael Field would have been only too well aware.33 The ‘honey’ contained in Wild Honey is, then, in part simply their poetry, their sweet offerings. This resonance achieved a much more precise intellectual currency around the middle of the nineteenth century with Matthew Arnold’s popularisation of the phrase ‘sweetness and light’ in Culture and Anarchy. Drawn from Swift’s celebration of the ancients in ‘The Battle of the Books’, Arnold extrapolates from the products of honey and wax to use the expression to denote a balanced Hellenic ideal which should be an essential part of modern culture: the love of beauty (material and spiritual) and intelligence. By the end of the century, however, this idealised Hellenic sweetness had taken on a rather more decadent aspect and came, more commonly, to be an expression of the kind of sexualised desire seen in Swinburne’s bees. Take ‘At a Month’s End’, for example,

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where the lover is imaged as ‘a tired honey-heavy bee / Gilt with sweet dust from gold-grained anthers’ leaving the ‘rose-chalice’: ‘I fly forth hot from honey-time’.34 An extreme example of the sexual charge of the bee, perhaps, but Michael Field were great admirers of Swinburne and sent him a copy of Wild Honey with an acknowledgement that Swinburne was of the new century, as they believed themselves to be: ‘With deep affection – the affection of the aging poet for the Poet crammed with age – I offer it to you. Of course to us now there is no English-breathing Poet save yourself. I, wistful for a reader, am glad you stay with us’.35 Honey was without doubt in part a euphemism for the eroticism that was such a definitive element in Bradley and Cooper’s pagan way of life. Other contemporaneous writers also use the honeybee in scenarios of love. Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s ‘Little Love-Song’, for example, begins, ‘I love you as the bee that sips / The flower’s lips’ (1899); and Joseph Skipsey’s ‘The Bee and the Rose’ imagines the rebuff of the bee’s embrace by the reluctant rose (1892). For Michael Field, too, the bee is undoubtedly a useful conveyor of sexual significance; and we can’t forget, given the importance of bees in this volume, that Cooper was for much of this time infatuated with ‘B. B.’; Bernard Berenson used the motif of bees on his notepaper as well as in his house in Florence, I Tatti (which was being rebuilt by Berenson at exactly the same time – between 1907 and 1910 – that Bradley and Cooper were producing and publishing Wild Honey. Certainly Berenson’s letter acknowledging his copy of Wild Honey is received with a very odd mixed response, which suggests that Edith’s emotional involvement with this ‘B’ was far from put to rest through her writing of the ‘Bee-Book’. The sight of his handwriting first evokes a paean to its loops and tendrils – ‘a thicket for Eros!’ – but this is followed by a rude accusation about his lack of sincerity, which is then followed up with ‘But, joy, he has written . . . ’.36 Of course, the sexuality articulated by Michael Field’s bee is homoerotic just as much as it is heteroerotic. Most notably, perhaps, Wilde’s ‘Helas!’ invokes a honeyed crime of unmistakably sexual resonance when he worries that he might lose his ‘soul’s inheritance’ because ‘with a little rod / I did but touch the honey of romance’. Drawing on the strange tale of Saul and Jonathan, Wilde engages with a biblical scene which both encodes homoerotic desire and allows it to go unpunished.37 In his edition of the Poems of John Gray, Ian Fletcher argues that Gray’s ‘Did we not, Darling, you and I’ (Silverpoints, 1893) ‘elegises a homosexual passion’. He specifically draws on the lines ‘The fluffy bee knows us and fills / His hive with sweet to think upon’, as an echo of the garden scene of

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temptation in The Picture of Dorian Gray (a text with which Gray was, of course, intimately linked).38 There is no doubt that Gray shares Michael Field’s investment in the bee,39 and Ellis Hanson also remarks upon Gray’s use of honey imagery as characteristic of that most Decadent of volumes, Silverpoints.40 Bees seem to have a peculiarly Decadent and homosexual sexual significance for Gray, which is born out in other writings upon poetry in the nineteenth century. This association can be traced back to 1873, when Alfred Lord Tennyson condemned ‘Art with poisonous honey stolen from France’.41 Here, the influence of France, is, of course, decadence; France coming to signify all that is corrupt, morally, and particularly sexually. ‘Honey’ is used here as a conventional metaphor for poetry, but it is also clear that Tennyson’s talk of ‘poisonous honey’ created a potent image of a homosexual, Decadent aesthetic. This is undoubtedly an influence that Michael Field drew on in their honeyed expressions of female–female desire expressed through their equivalent, ‘wild honey’. So, the bees of Wild Honey are those fed on wild thyme who, although rooted in a wider Arnoldian celebration of ancient culture, symbolise a more specifically fin-de-sie`cle conception of the pagan fecundity and sexuality of the ancient world; they are the bees who signify the ancient poets – Sophocles the ‘attic bee’ and Sappho the ‘Pierian bee’ – as well as the modern pagan bees of Tennyson’s ‘poisonous honey’ and the aestheticist bees of ‘B. B.’ Yet they are also the bees of Christian mythology that swarmed around St John – and the book is one which, like that of Revelations, tastes like honey in the mouth and induces Christian vision when ingested. This image system gives Bradley and Cooper the ambivalence they want in order to hold everything in a fine, paradoxical, balance rather than having to choose definitively between these binaries, or create a narrative which might seem to prioritise some of these bee significances over others. The bees throughout the volume, and those on the cover, ensure that all these themes are present simultaneously all the way through, even while the biographical narrative charts the progression from one theme to another. The flight of the bees ensures a synchronicity which would otherwise have been lost in the diachronic structure Michael Field also want to represent as structuring their period of transition. And it enables a combination of types of narrative we saw separately in the two editions of Underneath the Bough. If these multiple meanings are played out around the book as a whole, and through its position within a network of cultural and personal discourses, then they can also be seen at a textual level within the poems

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themselves. In the poems of this volume bees are repeatedly shown to have the power to salve temporal transition through their ability to preserve the past within the present. ‘Constancy’ (p. 173), for example, clearly connects bees with a timelessness, in this case the timelessness of true love: I love her with the seasons, with the winds, As the stars worship, as anemones Shudder in secret for the sun, as bees Buzz round an open flower [ . . . ].

There is something almost primeval about the bee in Michael Field’s poetry, and the relationship between flower and bee is an image as much from the ancient world as the modern. Temporal constancy is without doubt achieved in this volume through such bees as this one. More specifically, bees and honey are most explicitly connected in this volume with memory, and the idea of honey as a preservative. Early on, ‘Embalmment’ takes its theme both from the discovery of mummified bodies from ancient tombs, and Pre-Raphaelite myths about golden hair continuing to grow after death, until it filled the coffin: Let not a star suspect the mystery! A cave that haunts thee in the dreams of night Keep me as treasure hidden from thy sight, And only thine while thou dost covet me! As the Asmonæan queen perpetually Embalmed in honey, cold to thy delight, Cold to thy touch, a sleeping eremite, Beside thee never sleeping I would be. Or thou might’st lay me in a sepulchre, And every line of life will keep its bloom, Long as thou seal’st me from the common air. Speak not, reveal not . . . There will be In the unchallenged dark a mystery, And golden hair sprung rapid in a tomb. (p. 26)

In this poem the narrator calls on her lover to preserve her as a hidden fetish object, ‘embalmed in honey’. Honey is called on here to preserve desire. This results in a typically Fieldian contradiction between the inevitable coldness of the thing preserved, and the vitality of the desire which is being indefinitely prolonged. Hence, although ‘cold to thy

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touch’, this preserved love will continue to ‘keep its bloom’, and even result in ‘golden hair sprung rapid in a tomb’. This is a contradiction embodied in the very substance of honey, which, in its golden perfumed beauty, literally does preserve the beauty of a meadow of spring flowers in its very composition. Like amber, honey is both dead and living: a perfect image of the beautiful and transient, preserved. ‘Embalmment’, then, addressed very directly the patterning of history and time I have argued obsess Michael Field in this book. Very topical images from the discoveries in ancient sites are used here to think about the synchronicity between past and present – to image the surviving on into the present of the past – and honey is a very concrete symbol of the desire to evade change, while simultaneously embodying the transience of spring. Honey’s capacity to preserve the transient is invoked again, quite explicitly, in a poem much later in the book: ‘Miel’ (p. 96). Here the narrator watches a face lost in thought: Marks of a sudden praise, undreamed before, Even as stigmata awhile it bore, Then fell away to musing of its ease, As when the honey settles from the bees, Mingling its furze, and thyme, and hellebore To one bland recollection of the sun.

Honey again embalms. But here it signifies memory and the ability of the mind to mingle and preserve. To an extent this volume follows the recipe set out in this poem, taking memories over a long period of transition, and then holding them all mingled and suspended in a volume united by the very honey it mimics in its structure (the meaning of ‘bland’ here being smooth, or undifferentiated). However, for all that honey runs throughout the book, unifying and preserving, it does nonetheless simultaneously take part in the diachronic transition from pagan to Christian which structured Bradley and Cooper’s lives over this period. In the first half the honey is linked firmly with pagan mythology: whether it’s the honey smeared on Pan’s lips in the first poem, the honey fed to the child Bacchus (p. 54) or Cerberus’s honey-cake (p. 92). Honey loses this pagan significance as the book progresses – see ‘October’ (p. 111) and ‘Festa’ (p. 176), neither of which connect honey overtly with the pagan. A comparison of first (‘Pan Asleep’) and final (‘Good Friday’) poems in this volume show that what begins as Pan’s honey ends up as Christ’s blood: and in both

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cases it carries a sexual charge. At the start of the book it is Pan’s lips smeared with honey which represent a peculiarly pagan state of grace and peace: He half unearthed the Titans with his voice; The stars are leaves before his windy riot; The spheres a little shake: but, see, of choice How closely he wraps up in hazel quiet! And while he sleeps the bees are numbering The fox-glove flowers from base to seale`d tip, Till fond they doze upon his slumbering, And smear with honey his wide, smiling lip. He shall not be disturbed: it is the hour That to his deepest solitude belongs; The unfrighted reed opens to noontide flower, And poets hear him sing their lyric songs, While the Arcadian hunter, baffled, hot, Scourges his statue in the ivy-grot. (p. 1)

By the end of the book it is the narrator’s lips which kiss the ‘deepblooded crucifix’ which beatify: There is wild shower and winter on the main. Foreign and hostile, as the flood of Styx, The rumbling water: and the clouds that mix And drop across the land, and drive again Whelm as they pass. And yet the bitter rain, The fierce exclusion hurt me not; I fix My thought on the deep-blooded crucifix My lips adore, and there is no more pain. A Power is with me that can love, can die, That loves, and is deserted, and abides; A loneliness that craves me and enthrals: And I am one with that extremity, One with that strength. I hear the alien tides No more, no more the universe appals. (p. 194)

The focus on the lips renders both experiences deeply sensual and it is impossible not to read Pan’s honey-smeared lustful sleep into the narrator’s peace-giving bloodied kiss of the final poem. The very words ‘Wild Honey’ on the title page are in vermilion ink, hinting at the transubstantiation of honey into blood that we will see performed between the start and the end of the book. In a perverse interpretation of the mass,

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honey is the substance which signifies the blood of Christ, and it is this transmogrification which ensures the continued existence of the pagan within the Christian in this volume. It is almost as if Pan’s ecstatic dream is, by the end of the book, transformed into ecstatic reality, through the insight brought by Christianity. Pan may have escaped to a better world temporarily, but Christ enables a vision which reconciles the narrator to the universe more fundamentally. Michael Field’s ‘Honey-book’ is indeed that which is sweet as the honey of pagan delights, but it is also, ultimately, that honey which, when ingested, leads to ecstatic religious vision. Here the progressive conversion narrative is artfully combined with the concurrency afforded by the bee discourse which frames the book. This combination of temporal modes is crucial in that it allows the lifenarrative to be presented in a way which both acknowledges the changes Bradley and Cooper have gone through over the past fifteen years, while making sense of this microcosmic flux by appeal to unifying images which seem to promise an underlying larger-scale coherence. This movement from pagan to Catholic is presented within a framework which unites the two in order to connect Bradley and Cooper’s own individual conversion with the much greater cycles of time which were so important to the Victorians at what was clearly not only the end of the century but also the end of the Victorian era. ‘Various thyme/time’ is, indeed, central to the concerns of this volume whose wild, or passionate, honey enables a peculiarly aestheticist – and distinctly artful – temporal paradox to be crafted. the lyric book object: bee aesthetics and bee economics Apian Aestheticism, then, ensures a synchronic presence where we might otherwise find only diachronic structures, and represents an aesthetic unification of the various potentially contradictory terms which made up the identity of Michael Field. As well as operating across time and history, Apian Aestheticism is also active in ensuring a paradoxical reconciliation in another aspect of the book’s production. I noted at the beginning of this chapter that the fine covers of Michael Field’s books invite questions as to the relationship between that whole aesthetic realm of the book and the economic forces which inevitably framed it as a saleable object. Such questions have been recognised and discussed in relation to Michael Field’s drama,42 but it is in Wild Honey, particularly, that they impact upon the poetic oeuvre. Four of Michael

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Field’s plays were published by Charles Ricketts, covered with his own fine designs,43 and he also decorated Wild Honey, Poems of Adoration, Mystic Trees and Dedicated. Bradley and Cooper had, of course, sought out fine book design long before they met Ricketts, and George Bell and Sons (who published many of their works) had sent out Long Ago in very fine attire, with a gold design on vellum covers. Elkin Mathews and John Lane published three of Michael Field’s volumes under the imprint of the Bodley Head,44 with Sight and Song marking the first phase of the notorious publishing partnership, and clearly reflecting its ideals in the fine title page.45 The women continued to publish with Mathews after the partnership dissolved.46 Various other publishers and designers feature over the course of their career, including Sidgwick and Jackson, Eveleigh Nash, Sands, Selwyn Image (who produced the beautiful ornamentation for The Tragic Mary and Stephania), and The Eragny Press (who published Whym Chow clothed in Lucien Pissarro’s exotic suede jacket). The relationship between the women and the people who produced their books was often intense. They cared deeply how the books looked and it had to be right. Yet no relationship rivals the one they built up with Charles Ricketts, which is why it is in relation to Wild Honey that I turn to the issue of book design. This book, published by T. Fisher Unwin, who features particularly prominently in the publishing careers of women poets, represents the apotheosis of Michael Field’s textual liaison with Ricketts. To be sure, the dramatic texts published by the Vale Press were more ornate. Cooper did not initially take to Ricketts’ design for Fair Rosamund, finding the doves too rotund and sentimental, yet even she was thrilled when she finally saw the book in its cover.47 The trilogy of plays also decorated by Ricketts (The World At Auction, The Race of Leaves and Julia Domna) was even more splendid. The elaborate borders and covers are far more eye-catching than the simple, although very fine, cover of Wild Honey. Yet Wild Honey has, woven into its fabric, the most intricate and personal story of all. The rest of this chapter will suggest that the most fascinating dance of bees in Wild Honey is that surrounding textual production and consumption itself. Such tensions accrete around this volume and become a defining feature of it. Bees and honey, after all, are archetypal emblems of economies of production (the busy worker bee) and consumption (the gift of sweet honey). Theodor Adorno famously positioned late nineteenthcentury aestheticism as the moment at which art simultaneously becomes autonomous and decontextualised, separate from everyday life, yet increasingly involved with commodity culture and consumerism. L’art

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pour l’art is to some extent ‘the opposite of what it claims to be’.48 The various recent critical narratives of aestheticism – most notably those by Freedman, Gagnier, Schaffer and Psomiades – all recognise its ambivalent relationship with the marketplace, ‘Whether aestheticism is seen as a claim for the absolute autonomy of art, a critique of that claim, or the moment at which art abandons itself wholeheartedly to the world of commodities while pretending not to’.49 This theme was taken up in Michael Field’s 1898 verse-drama, The World at Auction, part of a trilogy of plays dealing with the idea of the state in the declining Roman empire. Paralleling the decline of the Victorian age, the questions asked in this play are as pertinent to the women’s own time as they are to its historical parallel. The message of the trilogy is that, while successive dynasties rise and fall, it is the Bacchic spirit of dance and entertainment, embodied by Pylades, who is handed on from one regime to the next, that is constant. The World at Auction explores the relationship between the aesthetic (in the form of Pylades) and the economic affairs of the state. Indeed, in this play the affairs of state have been reduced to a parody of late nineteenth-century consumer culture as Rome is auctioned off to he who will offer the Praetorian Guard the highest bribe: Didius Julianus. As Ana Parejo Vadillo comments, for Michael Field only beauty can offer an alternative to this consumer culture gone mad, and only Pylades (or, rather, what he represents) has the potential to save Didius and stop his consumerist craving.50 Vadillo points out that, although Didius’s daughter, Clara, manages to buy Pylades’ love with money, taking him into the sphere of commerce, he breaks the agreement when her demands become too much. Bacchic beauty is the only effective counter to the culture of consumption embodied by the state, yet it is simultaneously debased through its contact with the state. The play ends, uneasily, with Pylades’ too willing allegiance to the new regime after Didius’s downfall. It is in this context that I want to situate Wild Honey: drawing as it does on a period spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is formed both by concerns associated with literary modernism and by those of Victorian bourgeois culture. The tensions between economic and aesthetic forces so dramatically laid out in The World at Auction reach a subtle and lyrical solution in Wild Honey. The turn-of-the-century book of poetry represents a particularly complex and interesting intersection of the aesthetic and the fiscal, which means that Wild Honey is dealing with much more focused questions than those we see in the large-scale allegory of the play. Critics have told us that, due to the increasing viability of

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mass print circulation, by the late nineteenth century poetry had become a marginal form economically. In this difficult climate both male and female writers turned to self-consciously antiquated print formats. The attraction of the finely made, often limited edition, and certainly expensive, lyric volume at the end of the century was that it allowed the necessarily small sales of poetic texts to bring in a reasonable amount of money.51 This form of publication also appealed to those many Victorians who liked poetry more as an object or an idea than as a text to be read. These editions also allowed their authors to appear in print while preserving a sense of their aesthetic integrity. The finely bound limited book of verse, like Wild Honey, was, then, itself a product of a double narrative which satisfied both economic and aesthetic imperatives. The attempt to court an audience by self-conscious exclusivity sums up the economic/ aesthetic dialectic of the fine limited edition, and demonstrates the avantgarde strategies used, of necessity, in poetry before they became common in modernist prose. It is worth remembering that Charles Ricketts’s designs were central to this process with his new, beautifully designed, cover for Wilde’s volume Poems (first published in 1881) allowing the book to be presented to the public afresh in 1892, and confirming the power of the book designer in the reception and formation of poetic text.52 One of the ironies for both The World at Auction and Wild Honey is that, with their beautiful covers, designed by Ricketts, both books are a part of the commodity culture they criticise. In a letter to her friend and mentor John Gray, Bradley writes how, having seen Ricketts’s design for the cover of Wild Honey, ‘The cover is all my joy now - I want to cut the inside out [ . . . ] because I should like the hidden honey to remain hidden. A Lyric Poet shd. be put on the pyre the day he is published’.53 In this quotation Bradley sets up a dichotomy between the insides and the outsides of the book which expresses very succinctly the pressures Adorno identifies as forming this turn-of-the-century cultural moment. The beedecorated covers enclose the honeycomb which is there to be consumed, yet Bradley and Cooper are unsure about offering up their work in this way. Such beautiful covers, as Bradley recognises, make the book part of a commodity culture which puts their poetry, if not at the mercy of a mass audience, then certainly within economic structures. I will suggest that in the physical object of this book we see that thoroughly aestheticist anxiety about the relationship between the otherworldliness of high art, which appears in fine editions and limited print runs, and the economic realities of a burgeoning commodity culture which was precisely the motivation behind the sale of such beautiful objects. Bradley and Cooper themselves

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are torn between a desire for publicity and a readership, and a belief in the private ‘hidden honey’ that the true lyric poet should keep hidden. It is through Apian Aestheticism that this text achieves a paradoxical reconciliation between the two. In her groundbreaking study Beauty’s Body, Kathy Psomiades traces aestheticism’s negotiation between the aesthetic and the economic through the icon of the beautiful female body. For Psomiades, femininity – a concept itself fissured, for the Victorians, beneath the surface into multiple dichotomies - ‘allows for the difficult and vexed relation between the categories of the aesthetic and the economic in bourgeois culture to be represented and covered over by erotic relations’.54 Psomiades acknowledges in this study that certain writers of the fin de sie`cle, including Michael Field, refused to commodify female beauty in this way,55 yet in comparison with figures such as Swinburne, Bradley and Cooper’s intense interest in that turn-of-the-century transaction between the aesthetic and the economic has received little attention. In the rest of this chapter I will argue that in Wild Honey they offer a radical alternative figure to manage the contradictory imperatives of aesthetic and economic at the end of the century. It is the bees which, for Michael Field, act as arbitrators of aesthetic and commodity experience, as well as signifying all those other, more readily apparent, narrative paradoxes outlined in the first half of this chapter. Through this trope Michael Field refuse the objectification of the female body attendant on the strategy used by other aesthetes. Since the ancient world bees have held an important place in signifying the aesthetic. What has not been recognised is that bees had gained a new, topical, currency at the end of the nineteenth century. When, in 1873, Tennyson characterised the emergence in Britain of aestheticist poetry as ‘Art with poisonous honey stolen from France’, this was one of the first signs of the updating of the apian for a specifically fin-de-sie`cle usage.56 Laurence Hope’s ‘Life of the Bee’ confirms the appearance of a newly depraved bee. Based on the bee’s propensity to die at the moment it releases its sting, the poem transfigures the busy hum of the Attic poet into a Decadent trope of the most purple kind: Oh for the death of a beautiful purple bee, Sailing away to the blue of a limpid sky; To have yielded up one’s life in an ecstasy, And then, in the very climax of love, to die! To give oneself completely, once and for ever; Drink life at its utmost height as one laid it down;

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Perhaps more surprisingly, bees were also coming to prominence at the end of the century by taking a new role in an opposing dialogue of economic production. Nothing could be further from Hope’s bee than the worker bees of Bernard Mandeville and Karl Marx. Mandeville’s early eighteenth-century use of the bee to signify the ignoble worker without whom society cannot function used the hive to illustrate his thesis that all social goods are based on human vices. In this satire he elaborates on his belief that ‘All Trades and Places knew some Cheat, / No Calling was without Deceit’. Workers do their good work for the wrong reasons – ‘Physicians valued Fame and Wealth / Above the drooping Patient’s Health’ – and self-interest has reached a harmonious, workable, relationship with vice. For Mandeville, the bee society is invoked for its wellordered and regulated, but ultimately amoral, structures.58 Mandeville’s model was taken up and opposed by Marx, in Capital, where he drew a distinction between even the most lowly labourer and the bee on the grounds that the human labourer always has dignity and moral purpose. Marx is clearly drawing a contrast with the degraded status of the worker bee under capitalism.59 The hive itself had, over the course of the nineteenth century, acquired a particular political-economic significance, with George Cruikshank’s 1867 etching, ‘The British Bee Hive’, forming the apex of this particular trajectory. Here the structure of the hive is able to reflect the state as a harmoniously organised, ordered and balanced society, headed by the queen.60 By the end of the century, however, interest in the apian had changed: what had previously been a metaphor for the economics of the country actually became an important part of that economy itself. By 1874, when the British Bee-Keepers’ Association was founded, bees had become big business. In its 1911 edition, the Encyclopaedia Britannica included an entry on bees and beekeeping that stretched to 15,000 words; it claims that, during the nineteenth century ‘Almost everything connected with bee-craft has been revolutionized, and apiculture, instead of being classed with such homely rural occupations as that of the country housewife who carries a few eggs weekly to the market-town in her basket, is today regarded in many countries as a pursuit of considerable importance’.61 Beekeeping had clearly become newly important at the end of the nineteenth century as a model of economic production, but there is also a political subtext to this article which encourages analogies between the bee community and the human

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one. The reader is invited to find in the ‘wonderful condition of law and order’ of the bee community, ‘a model of good government for all mankind’.62 The model of governance being extolled here is clearly an orderly one with a clear hierarchy and a strict sense of the individual’s role in the collective project. Moreover: We cannot claim for it the virtue of strict honesty with regard to the stranger, but for its own ‘kith and kin’ it is a model of socialism in an ideal form, possessing nothing of its own yet toiling unceasingly for the good of all.63

A model of governance which privileges the family, and in which all strive for the good of the family unit, doesn’t seem such a surprising find at the turn of the century. Indeed, elsewhere in the article we are told that the ‘insect state’ ‘evidently has its origin in the family’.64 When the entry comes to describing the swarming of bees – the ‘enthusiastic emigrants’ – tumbling over one another in their rush to settle somewhere new, we see how the model of the hive is relevant to global, as well as domestic, Victorian politics.65 Within the late Victorian context of renewed interest in the apian, the bee must bring with it economic significances into the heart of an old aesthetic discourse. The figure of the bee, like ‘Beauty’s body’, was able to unite the economic and aesthetic at the same time as holding them apart. Writers were able to use this figure in order to mask and evade, as well as acknowledge, the tensions of producing art in a commodity culture by locating those tensions within something that was both natural and an ancient poetic figure. Bees manage to span that nineteenth-century shift of emphasis from production (the busy worker bee) to consumption (the gift of sweet honey), while also taking a full role in the resulting economics of pleasure which defined aestheticism. This is the discourse I identify as Apian Aestheticism: a crucially multifaceted bee discourse which arose at the turn of the century, enabled by the particular, and highly visible, significances of the bee at this time. Perhaps the most important non-fictional example of this discourse is shown in Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee.66 The Belgian playwright and poet was well-known in Britain at this time (and was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1911), and this work was published in an English edition as soon as it appeared in 1901. The book is based on Maeterlinck’s own beekeeping, and claims to quite simply record his observations of the beehive. Here, Maeterlinck combines heavily anthropomorphised statements of a political nature about the

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organisation of this society, with the kind of Decadent meditation on the beauty and pain of the bee life more reminiscent of Hope’s poem. As a result, observations such as those of the hive at its most richly endowed moment, just before the swarm leave it behind, are presented in economic terms – in a dry discourse of facts and figures: For this is the royal domain of the brood-cells, set apart for the queen and her acolytes; about 10,000 cells wherein the eggs repose, 15 or 16,000 chambers tenanted by larvae, 40,000 dwellings inhabited by white nymphs to whom thousands of nurses minister.67

But they are also endowed with a poetry of a deeply aestheticist hue: From the height of a dome more colossal than that of St. Peter’s at Rome, waxen walls descent to the ground [ . . . .] Here, lodged in transparent cells, are the pollens, love-ferment of every flower of spring, making brilliant splashes of red and yellow, of black and mauve. Close by, sealed with a seal to be broken only in days of supreme distress, the honey of April is stored, most limpid and perfumed of all, in twenty thousand reservoirs that form a long and magnificent embroidery of gold, whose borders hang stiff and rigid.68

The propagation of the bee is given an equally dual treatment. Towards the end of the book we see things from an evolutionary perspective, which places the bee within a rational economy of survival and sacrifice, while, earlier, bee-coupling is described in the following, rather Decadent, terms: Prodigious nuptials these, the most fairy-like that can be conceived, azure and tragic, raised high above life by the impetus of desire; imperishable and terrible, unique and bewildering, solitary and infinite. An admirable ecstasy, wherein death, supervening in all that our sphere has of most limpid and loveliest, in virginal, limitless space, stamps the instant of happiness on the sublime transparence of the great sky; purifying in that immaculate light the something of wretchedness that always hovers around love, rendering the kiss one that can never be forgotten [ . . . ].69

The combination of aesthetic, economic and political significances clustered around the bee here – but also the simple fact of the publication of a 350-page book devoted entirely to the bee – demonstrates the currency and multiplicity of the bee image at this time. In relation to Wild Honey, it should first be noted that this book looks very similar to Maeterlinck’s 1901 English edition. Both are covered in green, and decorated with a repeated, stylised, gilt bee motif. While

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Michael Field’s bees are arranged around a simple golden honeycomb structure, Maeterlinck’s bees are punctuated with golden pollen grains. Since Michael Field were well acquainted with this famous playwright and poet, it is impossible not to read their book in light of the concerns identified in this predecessor.70 Within Wild Honey, it is the relationship between the bee cover and the honeycomb insides which is crucial to this simultaneous holding together and apart of the economic and aesthetic. When Bradley writes that ‘A Lyric Poet shd. be put on the pyre the day he is published’, she captures very succinctly the misfit between the lyric and the economics of publishing which are so central to the finely tooled cover. The bindings of the book act for Bradley and Cooper like the dramatic stage, which, when the curtains open, reveals the lyric performance which was never meant for such public display. The disjunction between the framing cover and the ‘insides’ is not missed by the recipients of Michael Field’s books. On receipt of Sight and Song, Berenson writes of the ‘daintily bound’ and ‘prettily finished’ book that he ‘wanted to see what was inside’ before he thanked them for it.71 Similarly, Havelock Ellis writes on receipt of Long Ago that it is ‘very fair to look upon, so much so that one is almost content to gaze upon the article’. He adds, ‘I have scarcely yet looked into the inside but I can see that there is a great deal I shall enjoy’.72 The very seductiveness of the cover risks either prostituting or obscuring the private poetry within. It is through Apian Aestheticism that this text imagines a paradoxical fusion between what were acknowledged to be contradictory impetuses. This relationship between text and cover must be described in terms which echo influential studies that have situated the meaning of a literary text at the interface of its linguistic and bibliographic structures. Ge´rard Genette has given us the term ‘paratext’ to denote those bibliographical frames – such as the cover, the title page, the preface – which mediate between the work and its audience.73 In the 1890s the bibliographical aspects of the text had, of course, gained a new importance as Lorraine Janzen Kooistra has documented in her claims that ‘the page was reconceived as a unit of two-dimensional design and the book as a threedimensional art object that had the potential to be a thing of beauty as well as utility’.74 Kooistra has a very particular model of interaction between text and paratext, which she explores through the idea of a ‘bitextual’ relationship between text and image in fin-de-sie`cle books which acknowledges their new equality and the union, or power struggle, which can result from it.

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I suggest that in Wild Honey we see both the desired union between cover image and text, but also the struggle that inevitably ensues. In his manifesto of design - ‘The Unwritten Book’ in the second issue of The Dial (1892)75 - Ricketts himself declares his illustrations of text were designed both to express something of himself as well as to enhance the expressive qualities of the text. But above all he felt that design and text worked together to form part of ‘a whole in which each portion is exquisite in itself yet co-ordinate’.76 His cover image for Wild Honey is a fairly quiet and faithful, and beautiful, representation of the main theme of the book. In his design Ricketts took pains to depict a real bee and did not allow himself to give full rein to his own interpretative and imaginative freedom. The cover image is certainly a part of the whole, and it does not threaten the identity of the text in any way. However, there is no doubt that the cover design of Wild Honey commodifies the text, in a manner analogous to the nineteenth-century commodification of women.77 What we see in Wild Honey can be read in one of two ways: either Bradley and Cooper are carefully distancing the process of commodification from themselves by preserving an aesthetic space within the book which is kept at a distance from, whilst being mediated through, Ricketts’ cover (here the designer is the one who dirties his hands with public transaction), or we can see the designer effectively pimping the poetry. These are perhaps two sides of the same coin, and that coin is the double nature of the lyric book: the difference between the purchasable object and the object of aesthetic contemplation (‘what you can buy and what you cannot’, in Psomiades terms).78 In Wild Honey it is the bee that negotiates this relationship between the cover and the text, and is crucial to this simultaneous holding together and apart of the economic and aesthetic: Michael Field’s aestheticist bees are ultimately mediated through Ricketts’s saleable gilt bees on the cover. Yet this dynamic can be complicated if we look more at the personal relationship between writer and cover designer. A long series of letters between the women and Ricketts charts the negotiation and collaboration over the book, and suggests we should find a strong bond between the poems and the cover that encloses them. Ricketts was intimately involved in all aspects of the book production, and the correspondence was punctuated with sketches of bees and the rumination over the title: I do not care for Various Thyme, it suggests nothing to me, nor does it roll on the lips. [ . . . .] I think Honey of the Woods the best on the whole, and I should advise it: Honey of the Rocks might perplex people who might not expect to [?] find it cultivated there.79

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Cooper exclaims in the diary on first sight of the cover, ‘A lovely thing it is! Bees among paral paral paralellograms [sic] of their combs, & on the back single bees & several honey-bells’.80 On receiving the volume, John Gray remarks that ‘The decoration is rightness materialised’.81 This collaboration clearly led to a very pleasing marriage between text and book design. Moreover, Michael Field’s letters testify to the fact that some of the poems in the book were written specifically for Ricketts, forging a very explicit connection between insides and outsides, between writer and designer. In a letter to John Gray, Bradley writes of ‘Tommy’s’ (Thomas Sturge Moore’s) attempt to ascertain the external presences behind some of the lyrics in the volume. After identifying a couple of influential personages, he concludes, she quotes, ‘No, after another hunt, I decidedly cannot find Ricketts behind the rhymes, still less myself’.82 Bradley writes to Gray in a panic because she thinks Sturge Moore may have already shared his findings with Ricketts and left him feeling betrayed by the collaboration: ‘It may be already the poet has assumed the Palace, of its master there is no thought. What worlds may be ruined by the blindness of this bosom-friend’. Bradley turns to Gray’s help, begging him to hint to Ricketts in his letters of the poems in which his presence may be found. This intimate, and passionate, connection between poet and cover designer, which Bradley clearly thought would be apparent to her friends within the text, is a driving force behind Michael Field’s Apian Aestheticism. Reading the presence of Ricketts into the heart of this volume, as well as the bindings that surround it, gives us an important insight as to its conception and a clearer sense of how the economic reality of the worker bee, and the beautiful consumable honey, are held synchronically with the bees which signify the faint hum of Michael Field’s finely tuned, and barely audible, aesthetic voice. The need for secrecy has been recognised in Michael Field’s work by critics who tend to attribute it to the authors’ desire to hide their ‘perverse’ sexuality, or their dual authorship.83 Yet, primarily, this desire for ‘hidden honey’ to ‘remain hidden’ is an aestheticist urge for a rarefied voice. Doubtless, it did allow Michael Field to benefit, politically, from the suggestiveness and obscurity of its style, but this doesn’t seem a primary motivation for Bradley and Cooper. Certainly, Bradley and Cooper’s close friends and recipients of this book recognise their desire for secrecy as an aestheticist impulse. Cooper copies into the diary a letter from John Gray who comments that ‘The Wild Honey is full of enchantment . . . . There is a glorious busy hum like the sound of invisible things in the Italian

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summer’.84 Similarly, Berenson writes from I Tatti that the volume is so rich and concentrated that this volume, like any honey, ‘is not to be gulped down in gallon-measure by any person of my years’. As he ‘sips’ at this volume, he finds only one thing to criticise, which seems a result of the intensity he admires: ‘you unconsciously fall into a certain Donne-ishness, a certain obscurity’.85 Whether it is a positive feature or not, both correspondents find this need for secrecy a part of an aestheticist mode of writing, rather than a political necessity. The desire to ‘cut the insides out’ – to separate their poetry from the world of the commodity in which it must necessarily exist – is the theme which recurs throughout the volume. ‘The Poet’ (p. 58) presents a figure who is ‘a work of some strange passion / Life has conceived apart from Time’s harsh drill, / A thing it hides and cherishes to fashion’, and uses imagery which connects the poet with the Romantic solitary visionary (‘Within his eyes are hung lamps of the sanctuary’; he is ‘Holy and foolish’, ‘ever set apart’). Ironically, this reaching back to the past is at this time connecting Bradley and Cooper with the impending cultural rift, and the modernist exponent of ‘high art’ who also eschews ‘Time’s harsh drill’. ‘A Palimpsest’ goes on to explore a model for writing which will preserve the sanctity imagined above: . . . The rest Of our life must be a palimpsest – The old writing written there the best. [ . . . .] Let us write it over, O my lover, For the far Time to discover [ . . . ]. (p. 180)

This poem has multiple significances, drawing together many of the major themes in their lives. At its most explicit, it acknowledges, and simultaneously closes, the rift between their earlier pagan writing, and their later, Catholic, work, celebrating the continuation of their lives together and their ability to write the future over the past. It also voices their conviction that ‘they are a Great Poet – unappreciated at present, but certain to be famous and adored in the next generation’.86 However, the poem also reveals a peculiarly aestheticist desire to hide the lyric from the public gaze even as it is exposed in the published volume. Michael Field’s poetry is imagined as the obscured text of the palimpsest: something

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deeply buried but detectable by the finest of sensibilities. This need for a voice which is almost silent, a poetry almost invisible, draws Bradley and Cooper to an imaginative covering over of their work: they do not obliterate it, but veil it in an effort to maintain it at one remove from commerce and daily life. Perhaps the second-best thing to Ada Leverson’s parodic volume consisting entirely of margin (a poetry of such obscurity that it tested even the finest sensibility) is Michael Field’s palimpsest, which preserves a poetics of secrecy and liminality by insisting that the perfect lyric should be voiceless. Indeed, in her parody Leverson insists on a tension between the secretive, blank, insides of her volume, full of ‘beautiful unwritten thoughts’, and the commodified outsides – an elaborate cover of ‘Nilegreen skin powdered with gilt nenuphars and smoothed with hard ivory, decorated with gold by Ricketts (if not Shannon) and printed on Japanese paper’. In response to her satiric vision, Wilde promised to produce the volume (with Beardsley doing the unwritten text), adding, ‘There must be five hundred signed copies for particular friends, six for the general public, and one for America’.87 One wonders whether it was entirely an accident that Michael Field’s Wild Honey from Various Thyme, with its gilt design by Ricketts on a dark-green cover, bears such a close resemblance. Yet this attempt, within Wild Honey, to disconnect the space of art from the space of the market is deliberately troubled by the fact that the near-silent aesthetic voice within the volume is figured through the same bee imagery which also signifies the consumable book object. This tension between cover and text is brought into the poetry itself, through the presence of Ricketts within the poems. ‘Penetration’ is one very interesting example: I love thee; never dream that I am dumb: By day, by night, my tongue besiegeth thee, As a bat’s voice, set in too fine a key, Too tender in its circumstance to come To ears beset by havoc and harsh hum Of the arraigning world; yet secretly I may attain: lo, even a dead bee Dropt sudden from thy open hand by some Too careless wind is laid among thy flowers, Dear to thee as the bees that sing and roam: Thou watchest when the angry moon drops foam; Thou answerest the faun’s soft-footed stare;

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‘Penetration’ imagines, and enacts, the perfect lyric by aspiring towards a bee-voiced poetics only received by the attuned ear. Untarred by commerce, and almost unsullied by communication, their ideal lyric is a quasi-voiceless one. Like Ada Leverson, Bradley and Cooper fantasise the preservation of a rarefied poetry, within the commodified bee-mediated covers. Yet on closer inspection bee aestheticism and bee economy, seemingly so clearly held apart, begin to merge within this poem. ‘Penetration’ is a love poem – the first three words declare it so in no uncertain terms – and its eroticism cannot be divided from the language of the aesthetic. In this poem there is a clear distinction drawn between the erotic world of the near-silent voice, the almost imperceptible touch, and the almost invisible presence, on the one hand, and the commercial ‘havoc and harsh hum of the arraigning world’ on the other (what was termed ‘Time’s harsh drill’ in ‘The Poet’). Economic and aesthetic are clearly juxtaposed here, in order for the world of commerce to be dismissed as a world in which the pulse of the aesthetic voice cannot be detected. The narrator claims not to be dumb, but besieging her beloved ‘As a bat’s voice’, too subtle a signal to be heard above the din of the world. Yet, even so, ‘secretly / I may attain’. But what is attained, or penetrated by the narrator? What is attained is the force of the unexpected, almost silent voice which, like the dead bee amongst the flowers, manages to insert its presence almost imperceptibly. The narrator’s voice is like the moon behind the clouds, the silent faun: ‘No influence, but thou feelest it is there, / And drawest it, profound, into thy hours’. These final two lines of the poem, containing a summary of its meaning, work against the Petrarchan structure, by providing a would-be Shakespearean couplet, but without rhyme. The tension expressed in this formal conceit is a nice demonstration of the subtlety which is required of the stealthy penetration of the bat’s voice. This form of ‘penetration’ is not direct ‘influence’, but a more subtle conception of voice which reflects an aesthetic transaction between poet and audience. This is the truly aestheticist art which Psomiades finds in Swinburne is ‘felt on the pulses’, which ‘makes itself felt in the same ways in which a radical and unpredictable sexuality makes itself felt’. For Michael Field as for Swinburne, ‘the ideal aesthetic experience is the experience of being seduced, being made to feel oneself a body’.88 Aestheticism plays around a liminal state at the edge of meaning: it connects the lyric with secrecy and loss as well as potency and

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finer vision. To only see Michael Field’s writerly strategies as political devices for allowing the two women to write about taboo subjects is to risk missing the primary motivation for their poetry. I have indicated how, in this poem, the commercial world and the aesthetic world are presented in tension with each other, with the aesthetic voice in danger of not being heard amid the bustle of the economy. However, in spite of their desire to ‘cut the insides out’, to separate cover from contents, the presence of Ricketts within this poem makes that impossible. If this is a love poem, who is it for? Like all the bee poems, this poem functions on many different levels, but, most overtly, this love poem is one of those poems addressed to Ricketts that Bradley referred to in her letter to John Gray quoted earlier. Recognising Ricketts’ presence within this poem makes all the difference to our reading of the bee here. The dead bee in the poem is a direct reference to that ‘dear dead bumblebee – eternal among the years – that you gave me in another century than this’, invoked by Bradley in a letter to Ricketts recalling his gift of a bunch of flowers, that had playfully contained a dead bee.89 This letter, written around the time of publication of Wild Honey, but recalling a much earlier event, enables us to see ‘Penetration’ as one of those important pieces in the negotiation between Michael Field and Ricketts – between text and cover design – which shows how the economic bees of the cover with the aestheticist bees of the text are two sides of the same image. The bee enables a paradoxical fusion of contradictory concepts to be found within the book, even in a poem which appears to situate itself at the furthest remove from the economic realm. The dead bee at the centre of this poem is simultaneously the preserved model Ricketts sought in the Natural History Museum for his careful insect study for the cover design, as well as an image of Michael Field’s stealthy aestheticist voice.90 Throughout Michael Field’s work, bees – more usually live bees figured penetrating the flower bell – become a central signifier for the women’s idea of the subtle infiltration of the poetic voice to which they aspire.91 The gently humming bee entering the flower bell is symbolic of the mediation required for the aesthetic voice to be heard by its reader; it becomes a mediating presence, a link between one realm and another. The aesthetic penetration imagined in this poem is, unusually, too subtle even to be figured by the ‘song’ of the live bee and is instead imagined here as the presence of the dead bee, or the bat’s voice. By dedicating the poem to Ricketts and making his dead bee gift central to the poem and a signifier of the aestheticist voice to which they aspire, they draw together the cover art and the text, the designer and the writer, in a way which

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seems to imagine, or pretend, a possible reconciliation between the commercial world and the aesthetic. The intensely erotic charge of the sonnet is intrinsic to the bee motif and is an essential component of the sensual experience of the aestheticist lyric voice. It is also necessary to the mediatory function the poem performs between text and cover, between Bradley and Ricketts: Apian Aestheticism, as much as ‘Beauty’s body’, relies on seduction to hold together the contraries it embodies. As I noted earlier, ‘Penetration’ is paired with a poem called ‘Onycha’, which appears on the reverse of the page containing ‘Penetration’. In this volume pairings often take place not on the left- and right-hand side of an opening in the book, but on the front and back of a single page. This seems to indicate a desire for each of the pair to be traced through the other in the palimpsestic fashion discussed earlier - as if the words might somehow merge through the page, declaring the incompleteness of one poem without the other. ‘Onycha’ was one of Bradley’s many pet names for Edith. Combining erotic signifiers of shell and fingertips (‘ony’ from the Greek, meaning ‘nail’, ‘claw’ or ‘onyx stone’), the significance of which I will explore in my next chapter, ‘Onycha’ is a love song to Cooper. In 1900, Bradley gave Cooper ‘a little green silk book called Onycha’ in which she has ‘only written the lyrics I dare write beneath Sappho’s eye’.92 Paired with the love song to Ricketts, it too interweaves the erotic and the aestheticist voice suggesting a deep interconnection between the two: There is a silence of deep gathered eve, There is a quiet of young things at rest; In summer, when the honeysuckles heave Their censer boughs, the forest is exprest. What singeth like an orchard cherry-tree Of its blown blossom white from tip to root, Or solemn ocean moving silently, Or the great choir of stars for ever mute? So falleth on me a great solitude; With miser’s clutch I gather in the spell Of loving thee, unwooing and unwooed; And, as the silence settles, by degrees Fill with thy sweetness as a perfumed shell Sunk inaccessible in Indian seas. (p. 14)

Again, a near-silent penetration is imagined here, drawing, as in ‘Penetration’, on the natural world and its silent powerful splendours. Here the ‘heave’ of the honeysuckle expresses the forest, while the full

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bloom of the cherry tree, the movement of the silent ocean, and the ‘great choir of stars for ever mute’ sing their own song. These images, like the dead bee or the silent bat of the previous poem, enable the poem to invoke a near-silent communication only received by the finer senses of the beloved listener, who is loved without the conventional paeans of vocal wooing: ‘unwooing and unwooed’. Instead of the conventional love poem, this aestheticist lyric casts a silent, erotic, spell which also allows an answering communication from Cooper as the narrator fills with ‘thy’ sweetness ‘as a perfumed shell / Sunk inaccessible in Indian seas’. This exquisite imagining of silent communion, of the voiceless interpenetration of two people, defines Michael Field’s aestheticism and is probably responsible for that which is of most value in it. In comparing these poems, we see that Bradley’s love for Cooper is imaged through the ‘inaccessible’, while her love for Ricketts is imaged through the bees which, while signifying the aestheticist lyric voice, also have a place, and a price, in the economic realm. Her love for Edith is outside the framework of the apian, containing no contradiction, no difficulty to be resolved. In ‘Penetration’, Apian Aestheticism manages Bradley’s contradictory feelings about Ricketts at the same time as allowing her paradoxical reconciliation between the contradictions of her art and his commodity. It is poems such as this one that show the discourse of bees knitting together text and cover, aesthetic and economic, within the very text of Wild Honey. Michael Field was not the only writer to find in the bee the ability to signify that special relationship between economic and aesthetic at the turn of the century. The dependence of the aestheticist bee on the economic worker bee is the theme of a passage in a contemporaneous, and hugely popular novel, which Bradley and Cooper were sure to have known, and almost certainly read. The History of Sir Richard Calmady, by Lucas Malet (pseudonym of Mary St Leger Kingsley), was published in 1901 to great acclaim. This tale of a deformed man and his struggles with the world contains an epiphanic moment worked out in the same bee language used by Bradley and Cooper to negotiate their crisis in Wild Honey. The central protagonist is at the opera and looks out to see the opera boxes around him in the large auditorium as the units making up a giant honeycomb. This vision turns to a threat, as he imagines the worker bees turning against his class: For they were all peopled, these cells of the honeycomb, and – so it seemed to him – with larvae, bright-hued, unworking, indolent, full-fed. Down there upon the parterre, in the close-packed ranks of students, of men and women of the

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middle-class, soberly attired in walking costume, he recognised the working bees of this giant hive. By their unremitting labour the dainty waxen cells were actually built up, and those larvae were so amply, so luxuriously, fed. And the working bees – there were so many, so very many of them! What if they became mutinous, rebelled against labour, plundered and destroyed the indolent, succulent larvae of which he – yes, he, Richard Calmady – was unquestionably and conspicuously one?93

Talia Schaffer, in her important work on this novel, identifies this episode as the point at which ‘the novel turns on itself and externalizes, embodies, and repudiates its own aestheticism’.94 It is here that Richard sees the uselessness and sinfulness of the aestheticist things with which he has surrounded himself and at which he sees that it could, perhaps should, be destroyed by the masses. At this point of rejection of aesthetic consumption the novel turns back to the necessity of economic production and Richard turns over a new leaf as part of a productive economy. Clearly, here the economic realm of production and the aestheticist realm cannot co-exist. One both supports the other but also threatens to devour it. The instability of this dual economy, once recognised, resolves itself into a turn to the masses and mass culture at the expense of a rarefied aesthetic world. That the moment is worked out through the image of the bee is no coincidence. What we see here is really the instability of a culturally hybrid form: the aestheticist popular novel. This is similar to the instability of the aestheticist volume of poetry which is presented within beautifully commodified covers. Both Michael Field and Lucas Malet are producing texts at the very turn of the century, which make visible the newly apparent rift between high culture and popular culture, and between economic and aesthetic motivations, which so characterise this period. In both cases this tension is expressed through a discourse of bees. Yet, while Malet eventually resolves the tension in favour of an embracing of mass culture, Michael Field’s bees manage to combine both forces in a paradoxical, precarious, but finely balanced, whole, simultaneously posing the problem of the place of the book in the economic realm, but also figuring an apparent reconciliation between terms that seemed mutually exclusive. This is a sleight of hand which enables them simultaneously to avow and to disavow. The construction of such an intricate paradox is itself evidence of the authors’ aestheticist triumph. The apian discourse attracted them because of the complex politics (and economics, and aesthetics) of the hive encoded within the dance of bees at the very end of the nineteenth century.

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the gendered bee body Having earlier warned against overstating the importance of feminist commitment in the work of Michael Field, it must be said that there is a gender politics to the hive which of necessity accompanies the bee into the literature discussed here. Richard Calmady’s fear of being destroyed at the hands of the workers must be seen to be inflected with considerations of sex. As the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica entry tells us, on the approach of winter the male bees, being of no further use to the community, ‘are refused food-supplies by the [all female] workers, and are either excluded or banished from the hive to perish’.95 The beehive is a matriarchy, with both the queen bees and the workers being female, and it is the division of labour between these two groups which structures the hive. Maeterlinck devotes a whole chapter of his book to ‘The Massacre of the Males’, and describes the drones from the beginning as ‘three or four hundred foolish, clumsy, useless, noisy creatures, who are pretentious, gluttonous, dirty, coarse, totally and scandalously idle, insatiable, and enormous’.96 The neuter bees and the female bees, on the other hand, are described with wonder and awe for the complex social system they build. Richard Calmady’s vulnerable position within the hive is inevitably linked to his masculinity. The bee brings with it a very different gender politics from ‘Beauty’s body’, and one which might be much more useful for women writers. While ‘Beauty’s body’ commodified the female form, the bee suggests a political domain in which women control and rule. Moreover, it uncovers a subversive female system of social order and governance within a model entirely accepted by the writer of the piece in the Encyclopaedia Britannica who reflects, in this piece, so much about Victorian social politics. Of the decimation of the male bees by the female workers, this writer states: ‘Such ruthless habits of the bee-commonwealth, no less than the altruistic labours of the workers, are adapted for the survival and dominance of the species’. In her essay ‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’, Yopie Prins links the apian imagery in Pater’s ‘swarming’, winged, Maenads (in Greek Studies) with the angry buzz of Eliza Lynn Linton’s ‘The Wild Women as Social Insurgents’ (1891) in a way wholly relevant here.97 Prins then reads in Michael Field’s Callirrhoe¨ (about a spinster who is transformed into a Maenad over the course of the play) a message that combines, through apian swarming, emancipatory feminist politics with Paterian aestheticist ideals. Her case is supported by A. Mary F. Robinson’s review in The Academy which declares that Michael Field have brought the Maenad to

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Britain at a time when ‘Old laws are breaking up; a longing for freedom and mystery is born; tumult is in the air’.98 Pater’s dancing, ‘swarming’, Maenad is another resonance that Bradley and Cooper wanted to carry with the bees through Wild Honey. In the Michael Field journal of 1894, they describe an all-women picnic on Box Hill. During this party a young woman hitches up her skirt and dances. Bradley and Cooper write: What would a man have given to watch a sight so kindlingly beautiful! But it was one of those sights that are sacred to half the world of mortals – for this young girl could not even be got to dance in a ball-room, having felt herself degraded by the touch of a man libertine on the last occasion when she had accepted a man as her partner in a dance. She would only dance to women, in the midst of the womanhood of the earth [ . . . ].99

The girl lost all her magical powers when they returned to the world of civilisation, ‘But I had seen as pure a Maenad as ever danced over Citheron’.100 The ecstasy of the dancing girl is a part of the collective loss of individuality experienced by this group of women united in their pursuit of the ‘beautiful’. Michael Field’s ‘wild honey’ is made by wild bees, indeed. The bee is much more than the feminist Maenad, but the image does undoubtedly tie Bradley and Cooper into a gender politics which was potent for women writers in the several decades after them. Michael Field can be seen to be part of a trajectory which goes through to H.D. (who is usually read as reaching back to Swinburne rather than any female precedent) and Sylvia Plath. Poems such as Plath’s ‘Wintering’ – ‘The bees are all women [ . . . ] They have got rid of the men’ – is very different in tone from Michael Field’s poetry, but bears comparison with the Maenad entry in the diary referred to above. Critics such as Patricia Yaeger have noted the potency of the bee for women’s writing within the twentieth century.101 Yaeger weaves together a variety of theoretical writings (by Cixous, Derrida and Le´vi-Strauss, amongst others), as well as primary texts, to trace a honey-madness which puts women outside social structures. Wild Honey from Various Thyme is, in part, playing a role in the creation of a system of imagery which has a specific, liberating, meaning for the woman writer. ‘Apian Aestheticism’ is based on a highly visible proliferation of significances around the bee within discourses of religion, history, politics, economics and aesthetics towards the end of the nineteenth century.102 While both ‘Beauty’s body’ and Apian Aestheticism allow for synchronicity between aesthetic and economic, thus embodying the moment

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between high Victorian and high modernism, only the discourse of bees offered to do so in terms which hold a place in the politics of the future as well as the past. For any writer not wanting to enmesh their work within gender politics, or for a writer who simply wanted to avoid the well-worn cliche´s of female beauty, Apian Aestheticism offered a rich and more topical vocabulary for a very ‘modern’ dilemma. The reconciliation of pagan and Christian narratives also enabled by the bees in this volume solves the artistic problem faced particularly acutely in Underneath the Bough by enabling simultaneously diachronic biographical representation and artistic unity. Wild Honey reflects a turnof-the-century preoccupation with ‘various time [thyme]’ and ‘history’, and its very title should alert us to its self-conscious status as a work which deals with a cultural transition that is simultaneously personal and historical. The unity Michael Field achieves artistically in this volume is not merely a patching up of cracks which would inevitably burst open. Apian Aestheticism is based on an erotic and seductive intertwining of relationships and image systems that both defy and rise above such oppositions. Jonathan Freedman’s conception of a proto-postmodernism within late Victorian literature seems entirely relevant to the joyous seduction of Wild Honey – a volume whose ‘various thyme’ includes not just the early twentieth century to which Bradley and Cooper felt themselves belonging, but also a much later aesthetic to which Michael Field may, in some ways, more happily inhabit.

chapter 6

The Catholic poetry: the spiritual and historical ‘turn’ of the century

For current critics of Michael Field’s poetry, interest in the oeuvre ends when the two women convert to Catholicism. It is their joyous, pagan poetry, and their abandoned sensuality, that has generated the recent flurry of critical excitement. The poetry composed after the conversion is seen as embarrassingly florid, conventional and emotional. Angela Leighton, for example, writes that ‘Faith did not re-energise their poetry, but turned it, paradoxically, towards the very flaccid and flowery decadence which they had largely avoided before’.1 But this ‘conversion poetry’ – ignored also, for the most part, by contemporaneous critics – should not be dismissed so readily.2 It would be a mistake to let any exploration of Michael Field’s aestheticism stop at the point where, at the start of the twentieth century, it challenges – and is challenged by – newfound religious belief. The dialectic between pagan and Catholic in the conversion poetry produces a dynamic as exhilarating as that found in the earlier work. In this regard, it helps to bear in mind Ellis Hanson’s leading claim that ‘All the great works of decadent literature are conversion narratives’.3 If Wild Honey represents the artistic achievement I claim for it in my previous chapter, there will inevitably be a tendency to see this as the zenith of Michael Field’s poetic career, and the subsequent sacred verse as an artistic failure consequent on the primacy of devotion, rather than art, in their later lives. It is true that Michael Field’s output, which is always variable, included a higher proportion of lower-quality poems in these later volumes, but this can be explained by the fact that poetry only now became Bradley and Cooper’s major literary endeavour. As poetry took over from drama, they published a greater quantity of it, and with less selectivity came a higher number of poems which won’t leave a lasting legacy. Yet the best poetry from this period is often more accomplished than their better-known earlier pieces. The finest poems build on the success achieved in Wild Honey and continue its trajectory. This period of 168

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intense religious devotion was not a retreat from the aestheticism of their former lives, but a development of it. The integration of pagan and Christian motifs effected in Wild Honey is continued after the conversion crisis, in ever more provocative and challenging ways. In this chapter I show that Bradley and Cooper don’t give up on the pagan even at the height of their religious fervour; they continue the synchronic fusing of imagery as they reach for an all-encompassing spirituality which is perhaps more of the twentieth century than nineteenth. In 1900, on his deathbed, Oscar Wilde might have become the most famous convert of the fin de sie`cle,4 but during this period writers as diverse as Aubrey Beardsley, Alfred Douglas, Lionel Johnson, Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo) and Rene´e Vivien also looked to Rome. Recent criticism has amply demonstrated that Catholicism was associated in the late Victorian mind with homosexuality and paganism, and so it is no coincidence that it appealed to Decadent writers who practised one or the other, if not both.5 Throughout his major study, Decadence and Catholicism, Ellis Hanson has argued that Catholicism could ultimately be an acceptable container for homosexuality: a suitable stage upon which gay men could perform their desire.6 Further, what Maureen Moran has identified as the ‘cold limbo’ inhabited by British Catholics – ‘mistrusted and scorned by family and friends and the nation at large’7 – must have seemed like a good way of legitimising and protecting the space occupied by homosexual men after the Wilde trials of 1895.8 Perhaps the best representative of this fin-de-sie`cle climate is Bradley and Cooper’s close friend and confidant, John Gray. Gray was the author of that archetypal Decadent volume Silverpoints (1893) – with its beautiful binding with gold-leaf design by Charles Ricketts – yet he went on to become a Catholic priest in 1901 after a gradual drift back to the Church.9 Gray wrote Spiritual Poems in 1896, in what looks like an attempt to compensate for his Decadent works, but he soon dried up poetically. As Jerusha McCormack observes, he had: written nothing since he had sent his poem ‘The Emperor and the Bird’ to the ‘Michael Fields’ for Christmas 1908. He had not actually published anything of substance since 1905. The silence held until 1921, and, then, abruptly, was broken by a rush of essays and poems which were to continue until his death.10

This long silence was no doubt partly the result of the difficulty Gray had in negotiating a relationship between his new religious identity and his previous Decadent lyrics. Both Hanson and McCormack chart this

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struggle from Spiritual Poems onward. Gray’s religious lyrics currently command scant attention in comparison with Silverpoints, which remains of strong interest to scholars of Wilde. The Decadent John Gray, after all, has frequently been considered as the prototype for Wilde’s protagonist of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Most critics of fin-de-sie`cle poetry concur that Gray’s poetic career had run its course by 1896. By contrast, Bradley and Cooper never stopped writing poetry, and their religious lyrics were seamlessly integrated into their oeuvre. While Gray lost his voice, according to McCormack, from 1905 to 1921, it was during this period that he was helping Bradley and Cooper to cope with their transition from fin-de-sie`cle poets to Catholic converts. And, even if Gray produced no poetry during this time, his letters to Bradley, together with his theological advice, enabled the two women to find a voice for their transition, and to integrate it with their literary past. John Gray and Michael Field had known of each other’s work for some time and Charles Ricketts, a mutual friend, had tried to foster this connection.11 Yet Bradley and Cooper didn’t meet Gray until January 1906 in London. At this point they were still joyously pagan, devoted to their dog and each other, while Gray was already a priest, and had sublimated his relationship with Marc-Andre´ Raffalovich into a close but formal friendship.12 This meeting proved timely, because it was on their return home that Bradley and Cooper discovered their beloved dog was dying and their own spiritual crisis began. This turn of events drove Bradley and Cooper to seek out further communication with Gray, and soon he and Bradley were exchanging letters on a very regular basis (some letters from Cooper also survive, but are much less numerous; and Bradley claimed to write for both). Some months after Whym Chow died, Bradley wrote to Gray describing her conversion, in response to his account of his own spiritual crisis: ‘There! I have told you of my [?]intercession, as simply & bravely as you confide to me; & I shall never forget [?]them – the story of yours’.13 The similarities between the two stories are apparent. Like Gray, Michael Field was an 1890s poet, and like him Michael Field was involved in the expression of homoerotic desire. Moreover, when both Gray and Michael Field converted to Catholicism they shared an anxiety to leave behind, cover up or transform a past of which they were ashamed. It might be said that the outcome of the Wilde trials in 1895, which prompted Gray to turn to Rome, was an equivalent moment to the death of Whym Chow that set Bradley and Cooper on their path to Catholic faith. But, as McCormack writes, it is specifically Bradley’s ‘struggle with ‘‘heretic blood’’ ’ that re-enacts Gray’s ‘history of spiritual crisis and

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reconciliation’.14 In the letters between the two, Bradley’s and Gray’s shared and troublesome trajectory – from ‘damnable aestheticism’ to Catholicism – becomes readily apparent.15 McCormack asserts that Bradley was one of the few people in Gray’s later life who connected his past with his present; her hybrid nickname ‘Father Silverpoints’ could only come from one who shared this particular path toward conversion.16 Through their correspondence between 1906 and 1914, Gray exerted a huge influence on the poetry of Michael Field, and he helped the women to avoid the silence into which he had fallen. That this was a painful process for Gray, and one through which he relived his own past, is clear from a letter he wrote to Bradley in January 1907: ‘You cause me a start when you allude to my conversion; you make me remember the ecstacy [sic] of those days when I wrestled with the Father of the angels’.17 Yet, in providing them with his own most comforting elements of doctrine, he gave Bradley and Cooper the theological tools and framework they used in their poetry to accomplish their own reconciliation of their perverse, pagan poetic past (and their desire for each other) with their newly found Catholic faith. It is essential to the see the story of their Catholic faith within the context of John Gray’s conversion, and thus to reveal the crucial links between their little-discussed spiritual crisis and his emblematic one.18 I begin with a comparison between Michael Field and John Gray which will help illustrate the claims made above for their rather different textual conversions. In the last chapter I read the poem ‘Palimpsest’ in Wild Honey as an articulation of a poetics of secrecy and liminality: a graphic image of the aestheticist doctrine of the just-seen and the just-heard. In the context of this chapter, it is also necessary to see ‘Palimpsest’ (occurring towards the very end of Wild Honey surrounded by poems newly concerned with Christian motifs) as an indication of how the old, pagan, way of life must be written over and subsumed in favour of the new Catholic narrative: ‘The rest / Of our life must be a palimpsest – / The old writing written there the best’. Here, on the cusp of their conversion, Bradley and Cooper proclaim their desire to mask the narrative of their former life, while not erasing it: ‘Let us write it over, / O my lover, / For the far Time to discover’ (p. 180). In fact, only a few years after the publication of Wild Honey, the women do very literally create a palimpsest out of this very volume of poetry. There exists a copy of this volume, dedicated from Michael Field ‘To the Very Revd, the Prior of Holy Cross – / in autumn / Michael Field’ in 1911.19 If one opens up this volume, the most explicitly pagan poems have either been crossed out

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or have had new Christian poems written in manuscript and pasted in over the top of them by Bradley and Cooper. This act of post-publication editing to befit the volume for a new audience is typical of Michael Field’s palimpsestic process of adaptation. In a letter to Gray, Bradley writes of her shame at their earlier poetry: ‘what hot cheeks for the religious !! poems in Wild Honey. Is there nothing to erase them? – all, save the envoi. With lay hands they touch the things on the altar, they offend’.20 This shame was only too familiar to Gray, of course: he spent the rest of his life on the quest to buy up and destroy copies of the limited edition of Silverpoints. Michael Field took an altogether different approach that signals their greater poetic adaptability. Instead of burning Wild Honey, Bradley and Cooper adapt it to a new audience and then rejoice that ‘Now the Church has welcomed the Honey-book. Fr. Vincent amazes me – & it seems to me every Catholic I meet loves it’.21 So, while sharing Gray’s shame, Michael Field ultimately chose to transform rather than destroy – to write over rather than ‘erase’ completely. And this ability to create a dual narrative in their poetry is never relinquished. Bradley and Cooper effect this palimpsest – this revealing, while concealing – within their poetry by keeping many of the same symbols and images that used to signify their pagan desire, and writing them over with a new religious significance. The poems I will examine invite us to misconstrue them: in misreading them as stories of an erotic or aesthetic encounter, or misreading them as stories of a religious encounter, we discover the fluidity of a poetic identity that interlaces past and present, as well as self and lover, to create a personal mythology which is not only governed by its own logic but which also strives for a coherent interface with the cultural concerns of the age. Michael Field’s later work is crucial to our understanding of the relationship between Catholicism and aestheticism which is, in turn, essential to our understanding of the turn of the century. This chapter is based around the dichotomy between Bradley and Cooper’s ‘pagan’ existence (including not only their identification with pantheistic religion and the Graeco-Roman world, but also aspects of aestheticism and the homoerotic) and their new Christian faith. It is a specifically poetic reconciliation between the two that I trace in this chapter. Yet late nineteenth-century Catholicism, much more than other forms of Christianity, already has the seeds of this reconciliation at its core. It was (to use Ellis Hanson’s words) in some ways an ‘acceptable container’ for much of Michael Field’s past life, as well as representing a departure from it. Looking back on their first Mass, Bradley and Cooper write of their pagan affiliation being replaced by their new faith: ‘Demeter &

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Dionysus (our lord Bacchus) yield themselves up as victims to the great Host, the Saviour of the World – ‘‘et antiquum documentum novo cedat ritui’’ [and the old forms give way to the new Rite]’.22 Yet, this is no clearcut transition from the old to the new. In Michael Field’s conversion poetry we find a rich and complex texture, resulting from the artistic incorporation of the pagan into the Christian. Michael Field published three volumes between 1908 and Bradley’s death in 1914: Poems of Adoration in 1912, Mystic Trees in 1913 and Whym Chow: Flame of Love in 1914. (Dedicated was also published in 1914, but belongs to an earlier period, as discussed in Chapter 4.) Another volume which will be considered here is The Wattlefold – a collection of unpublished work edited by Emily Fortey in 1930, containing devotional poetry by Bradley and Cooper from 1907 onwards. One of the most distinctive features of the three volumes published by Bradley and Cooper at this time, other than their devotional focus, is the separation they inscribe between Bradley and Cooper’s lyric writings. No more is Michael Field an indivisible whole: at this stage Michael Field becomes two distinct authors who both add to the collective canon. Just as Dedicated was Bradley’s homage to Cooper’s work, so Whym Chow is, in large part, also a collection of Cooper’s poems, edited by Bradley after her death. Like Dedicated, it is not a volume central to the Michael Field oeuvre, but in its marginality it represents an exaggerated version of a problem at the heart of Bradley and Cooper’s work and will allow me to discuss the hugely important issue of ‘Camp’: something which must be addressed if Michael Field is to be taken seriously. Although both published under the Michael Field signature, Poems of Adoration was written mostly by Cooper, and Mystic Trees by Bradley.23 Yet these two together form the major collaborative work of the period: they were designed as counterparts, which would form a complete whole when united with the specially made black leather strap.24 This new kind of collaboration clearly still entailed close involvement with each other’s work, including shared proof-reading and editing.25 This is not an abandoning of literary collaboration, but it certainly does seem to reflect the greater distance between the two women that religion, at least ostensibly, established (see Virginia Blain’s analysis of Cooper’s conversion as a bid for freedom from her aunt).26 It is only in the posthumous collection by Emily Fortey – The Wattlefold – that the poems of the two women again appear thoroughly mixed within one volume. While the work in this volume is uneven in quality, some of it is extremely good poetically, and often more interesting than that published in Mystic Trees

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and Poems of Adoration. These two major companion volumes are formed by a new awareness of how the women are seen by the world, which, while it does not stifle the women’s poetic talent, pushes out to the margins anything that is problematic. For this reason, in this final chapter, my exploration of the religious poetry will spend more time in the margins than at the centre. In the rest of this chapter I will examine closely one poem from each of the four books of verse relevant to this final period in order to explore the development of the strategies of synchronicity seen in Wild Honey. In particular, my interest in this later poetry lies in the way pagan and Christian are intertwined on a very detailed level of metaphor and image. What I identified in the overall narrative structure of Wild Honey, I will follow through on a much more detailed level in this chapter. Even at this time, when the women may seem to have moved on from that transitional moment limned in Wild Honey, a close reading of the poetry tells a very different story. the bee In Mystic Trees we find a poem which continues the bee imagery so important to the fusion of concepts achieved in Wild Honey (‘Before Requiem’): Bees from loveliest fields of light, Make our darksome candles bright! From the balsam beds ye come To build glory round the tomb. Angels from the summer ye, Angels to our Mystery, That these golden rods, that stand Sentry to our dead, have planned! Pause upon us; stay from hell Our poor souls with hydromel; Work us wax so fine, its flame Be of God’s the very name. Bees, O autumn bees, that fled Home with tribute for our dead, Very gentle be your doom, Dying on the ivy-bloom! (p. 93)

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Here another facet of the bee image is exploited: the conjunction between angels and insects results in bees as mediators between the earthly and the heavenly. In this poem it is the ‘golden rods’ of the beeswax candle (and particularly here the paschal candle) which enables the bee to have this religious significance. The candle provides light – and, by implication, temporary salvation – in God’s name, but this is also the pagan light brought in from the ‘loveliest fields’ by the insects. It is no coincidence that the pollen-loaded stamens of the fertile flower, so central to Michael Field’s pagan poetry, are also invoked by the image of the ‘golden rods’ of the candles. This strategy of bringing together pagan and Christian through the bee is discussed overtly in a letter from Bradley to John Gray, where she writes about Cooper’s recent acceptance into the Church: Cooper was found by the clergy to be ‘already full & entire Catholic on the central doctrine of the Blessed Sacrament’ while Bradley waits at the door wanting to be allowed in to make ‘true confession’. ‘It cost much for us – who are one poet – thus to break in twain’, Bradley observes. ‘For me, I must wait, till you know whether you can open the door’. In this letter, Bradley worries that she is ‘too wild for the Fold’: ‘I love all that is pagan in the Church so dearly. I love the Paschal Candle with a great hugging love. I want to [?]sing the bees who make the wax. I love all about the lights. [ . . . .] Is it that once I was a torch-bearer on the hills?’27 The above poem illustrates this passage in poetic practice, celebrating a pagan desire through the liturgy and emblems of the Church. Bees and angels come together in the figure of the paschal candle to produce a light sacred both in Christian liturgy and pagan symbolism. This intense need for Bradley to find her religion through the natural world is an ongoing theme of the volume. In ‘White Passion-Flower’ (p. 42) the poet explores the relationship between the passionflower – so termed because of the fancied resemblance of parts of the flower to the crown of thorns, nails and other emblems of Christ’s passion – and the passion itself. The question is about how one thing symbolises another, or becomes another. How can this pure white flower symbolise the pain and blood of Christ? The poet answers by comparing the flower’s symbolism with the transubstantiation achieved by the pale wafer: Lovely, waxen flower, I am content With your whiteness of the firmament: Even as in the Host The Precious Blood is lost, On your unblooded disk I see How the Lord is dying on Calvary.

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It might seem strange to solve the problem of how the flower signifies Christ’s passion by reference to the much greater theological dilemma of transubstantiation, but what Bradley is really after here is not an explanation, but an alternative route to God through a symbolism which celebrates the pull of the natural world at the same time as signifying the spiritual realm. Bradley’s compelling struggle with her new faith must be set against Cooper’s gorgeous lyrical effusions in Poems of Adoration. ‘Imple Superna Gratia’ (Poems of Adoration, p. 92) shows how inseparably intertwined aestheticism and the religious have become by this stage in her work: We may enter far into a rose, Parting it, but the bee deeper still: With our eyes we may even penetrate To a ruby and our vision fill; Though a beam of sunlight deeper knows How the ruby’s heart-rays congregate. Give me finer potency of gift! For Thy Holy Wounds I would attain, As a bee the feeding loveliness Of the sanguine roses. I would lift Flashes of such faith that I may drain From each Gem the wells of Blood that press!

The poem again figures the bee, using images of the bee penetrating the flower and the beam of sunlight getting to the heart of the ruby in order to illustrate the narrator’s claim for a greater sensitivity of perception. This is required for the narrator to penetrate, understand and attain the wounds of Christ, as the bee penetrates the red roses. This is necessary to obtain ‘flashes of faith’, inspired by meditation on Christ’s wounds; and from these moments the narrator wants to distil the essence, ‘the wells of Blood that press’. Yet what adds such richness to this poem is the combination of religious vision with Paterian aestheticism. As in Bradley’s poem, the bee here is almost like the angel mediating between heaven and earth, between human and divine, but also bridging aestheticist and Catholic symbolism. More specifically, the narrator’s desire for ‘finer potency of gift’ echoes Pater’s celebration of the ‘finest senses’ in The Renaissance.28 The ‘flashes of faith’ sought in this lyric suggest the value of the fleeting, transient impressions also celebrated in The Renaissance. The ‘Gem’ of the last line appears to signify both that

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visionary moment, but also the beads of blood which well up from Christ’s wounds: indeed, Christ’s wounds are the source of faith and vision in this poem. This image resonates strongly with that most poignant of Decadent images: Pater’s ‘hard, gem-like flame’. Here we have Pater’s image of a precious, tangible, thing being distilled from fleeting moments, from flashes of faith, being used to denote religious experience. This combination of discourses results in a particularly perverse vision in this poem: the bee taking pollen from the flower becomes likened to a feeding off the blood of Christ’s wounds. This mixture of religious zeal and the Decadent erotic takes the poem to a rhapsody of a vampiric nature. ‘Imple Superna Gratia’ – ‘fill up with divine grace’ – is a part of a medieval Catholic hymn, ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’, which is the Office Hymn for Second Vespers of Pentecost (and would have appeared in Michael Field’s Breviary). It celebrates being filled with the divinity of the Holy Spirit, and inevitably contains resonances of the Eucharistic ingesting of Christ’s blood and body. In this poem the taking in of the Holy Spirit is imagined very literally as a feeding from Christ’s body. Moreover, the quasi-Decadent imagery enables transubstantiation to become a sexualised feeding on Christ. Such a vampiric interpretation of the Eucharist seems rather more perverse than equivalent images within male homoerotic Catholic discourses – by Raffalovich and John Gray – which fetishise the wounds of Christ. Bradley and Cooper were certainly influenced by male homoerotic lyrics on Christ’s wounds, but in adapting these strategies for the use by the female writer, they often create something more striking and more provocative.29 The harmonious dovetailing of aestheticism and Catholicism in this poem successfully hides what was in fact a contested relationship between the new faith and Michael Field’s textuality. Such worries were pushed to the margins, and surface in The Wattlefold, where ‘How Letters Became Prayers’, and ‘How Prayers Became Letters Again’, dwell on the problem (The Wattlefold, pp. 71, 72). The former poem tells us how the writer used to spill everything out in letters, until she grew obedient to her religion and prayed in silence instead. In the latter, the writer tells us that she could not stand the silence: ‘life is so miraculous inside / My beating brain, it were a suicide / To give no record of it to the pen’. This sentiment is almost certainly Bradley’s, but there is no doubt that for both women the conversion threw into question both of the core aspects of Michael Field’s identity – which they earlier defined as ‘Poets and lovers’ (Underneath the Bough, p. 79). There is no doubt that it is the

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attempt to reconcile images of their love with their new-found faith which provoked the most ingenious thinking at this stage in their career, and it is around this dilemma that the rest of this chapter will revolve. blessed hands The diaries and letters testify to Bradley and Cooper’s sense that there was a conflict between their physical passion, so much associated with their previous pagan existence, and their new faith. Chris White examines the ‘complicated shifts’ which took place in their conception of their own relationship when they converted to Catholicism, identifying a need to avoid fleshly sin, and swear allegiance to ‘chastity’.30 After all, although their conversion to Catholicism in 1907 was primarily, and sincerely, motivated by personal factors, it may not be a coincidence that it happened at a time when homosexuals were feeling the strain of being ‘defined’. Whether or not it was a part of the motivation behind Bradley and Cooper’s conversion, the conversion may have acted to some degree as a shield for their relationship.31 Certainly the prizing of celibacy over maternity and marriage in pre-Vatican II theology contrasted starkly with expectations outside the Catholic Church, and was a very comfortable ideology for the woman-loving woman.32 In his detailed study of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Richard Dellamora has examined how Hopkins’ Catholic conversion permitted the poet ‘to conserve and to celebrate’ his attraction to other men.33 By ‘focusing desire on the real but transcendent body of Christ’, Hopkins aimed to allay the problem of illicit love: Oxford Catholicism offers Hopkins not only a genuinely religious but also an alternative masculine ideal, in which Christ embodies Hopkins’s aspirations in a form not only ascetic or mortified but also physical and radiant. In turning to Catholicism, Hopkins was able to find a theology that emphasized the worthiness of the redeemed human body, including its genitality [ . . . ].34

If Hopkins can be seen, to some extent, as a bridge from mid-century ideas of muscular Christianity to fin-de-sie`cle Decadent obsessions with Catholicism, then this moment at the very end of the century, inhabited by Gray and Michael Field, looks less isolated and its sexualised religious discourse has some precedent.35 Moreover, Richard Dellamora notes that the new constraints that sent male homosexuals to seek the shelter of the Church were affecting lesbians and New Women, too.36 Yet neither he nor critics such as Ellis Hanson give us any evidence for believing that

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such strategies around Christ’s body could be useful for enabling a rapprochement between female same-sex desire and Catholicism. The props and narratives that Catholicism appears to have offered male homosexual poets (including Christ’s body as an emblem of the desirable and desired male body) are much less obviously beneficial for figuring desire between two women. To be sure, other – expressly feminine – tropes were available to Bradley and Cooper within the Church.37 Ruth Vanita, in her account of Michael Field’s work in Sappho and the Virgin Mary, claims that Bradley and Cooper’s conversion ‘occasions a shift from Sapphic to Marian imagery, but the content does not alter substantially’. She pays particular attention to Mystic Trees, in which she finds the celebration of the ‘power and strength’ of Mary through poems charting her life story. Here, writes Vanita, ‘Katherine’s [sic] poems often blend her praise of Edith with that of Mary so that the two are indistinguishable’.38 Frederick S. Roden builds on Vanita’s brief account, devoting much of his important chapter on Michael Field to Marian imagery, the feminisation of Christ through Mary, and poems celebrating biblical women and female saints. He notes here that Mary’s superiority ‘removes her from human heteronormative desire and leaves her for God’, but that this opens a space for Michael Field to present her as emblematic of a community of female same-sex desire.39 I will not explore these themes here – partly because Roden and Vanita have already covered this ground extensively, but more importantly because the aim of this chapter is to contextualise Michael Field’s work within the influence of one of their great male mentors and the tropes of male homoeroticism. Vanita observes astutely that modern critical histories of Victorian gender and sexuality – which are often concerned with tracing lesbian or masculine networks and communities – ‘almost completely elide[s] the importance of relationships between homoerotically inclined men and women’.40 Yet she does not pursue these relationships in conjunction with Michael Field’s later work. In what follows, I place Michael Field’s spiritual poetry within the context of the correspondence with John Gray and show how Bradley and Cooper’s religious discourse needs to be situated, at least partly, within – as well as growing out of – a more established and more visible male homosexual theological language. What we find is that, although it has to be taken within a system of imagery which pertains to female bodily desire, Christ’s body functioned in a similar way for Bradley and Cooper as it did for Hopkins and Gray: both as an acceptable cover for their relationship, and to offer it a place within an acceptable structure. The

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imagery of the following poem provides a combined religious and erotic charge, which gives it an energy as attractive as that of their pagan poetry. This poem is ‘Blessed Hands’, from The Wattlefold: I Virginal young finger-tips Offered eager to my lips To confer more blessing of the Chrism Filtered down from God’s abysm! What of dew, kissed as it shone, Wild rose I have fed upon— Flesh that fortifies and wins, Finger-tips forgiving sins! Flesh that bears of sin no trace Flesh that is of Mary’s grace, Bough from Heaven let down that we Kiss of Paradise the tree. Lovely and incarnate things, Clean as violets at their springs— Let us touch them, kiss them, pray For our Resurrection-day! II Hands just blessed and consecrate Blessing my low head— Then each one outspread With joined tips as on a bed Of sea-sand the sea-shells mate Shining valve with valve rose-red. From God’s sea, O priestly hands Ye are shining and so sweet, Held to me, my homage is complete And the kiss I fall on you Is softer than a Bridegroom ever knew. Soft as that brine that swathed you in its bands, That moves your young and shell-like finger-tips Up to the softest motion of my lips. (pp. 66–7)

‘Blessed Hands’ can initially be read as the story of the narrator receiving religious blessing from her priest. The ‘priestly hands’ rest, outspread on

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her head, and touch her lips in an offering of benediction. Biographically, the narrator could be either Bradley or Cooper – or both if we take seriously their claim to write as one – receiving the Church’s blessing. All we know about the bearer of those holy hands is that he is ‘young’. Gray would seem to be a good candidate to fill this role. He was one of their favourite priests. He was younger than both of them, and considerably younger than Bradley. Yet the unmistakable erotic charge to these hands seems quite inappropriate as part of the narrative between the women and their male priest, and certainly doesn’t fit with the tone of their interaction with Gray in their letters. The inability of the explicit narrative of the poem to entirely account for its imagery highlights the existence of a less literal dimension to the verse: the ‘blessed hands’ that title the poem are also implicitly the wounded hands of Christ. Bradley’s correspondence with Gray points, indirectly, to Christ’s figuration in the poem; in an undated letter, she describes her station at the ‘blessed feet’, dripping with blood, of Christ on the crucifix.41 While this extract from her letter does not fully explain the erotic core of ‘Blessed Hands’, it helps to shift our understanding of what at first appears to be a literal encounter between priest and supplicant. The conceit of hands, touching in prayer like the kiss of lips, is a traditional device with a long heritage. In a well-known dialogue in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers act out just such a motif. Here Shakespeare has the touch of the hands in prayer modulate to the touch of lips in erotic union: ‘O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do: / They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair’.42 It is this same conceit that Michael Field deploys in the above poem. Hands and fingers in prayer kiss and are kissed; the poem is devotional and erotic simultaneously. And it is worth remembering that the ‘holy palmer’s kiss’ that Romeo figures is an excuse to legitimise amorous contact. Already, then, there are clues that for Michael Field the sacred context of ‘Blessed Hands’ provides legitimacy for their intimacy. But, importantly, Michael Field’s poem moves away from the traditional heterosexual setting of the ‘holy palmer’s kiss’ of Romeo and Juliet. In fact, since Cooper converted to Rome before Bradley, leaving Bradley anxious to join her, we might read ‘Blessed Hands’ as a work that describes Cooper’s hands as ‘priestly’. This reading suggests a narrative in which Bradley receives a sexualised blessing from Cooper. Moreover, that the ‘youth’ of the blesser is stressed in the poem accords with Bradley’s denotation of Cooper elsewhere as ‘Child’ (even when Edith was in her forties and Katharine sixteen years older). In this light, we can understand

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more fully the significance of the hands that touch the supplicant. As many critics have recognised, hands and fingers hold a special place in contemporary lesbian symbology. The lesbian hand is sexy and stimulating, and a useful metaphor for what cannot be depicted explicitly.43 ‘Erotic power, wound, need, hands’, writes Teresa de Lauretis, ‘these are the signifiers of [lesbian] desire’.44 It seems likely that hands could signify a desire between women in the nineteenth century also. Writing specifically about lesbian codes in Victorian poetry, Virginia Blain has warned us not to overlook the importance of hands as erotic signifiers.45 Blain’s observation is relevant to a number of poems by Bradley and Cooper, including a strange poem in Underneath the Bough that describes an encounter with the fairies and which focuses on the touch of their ‘strange, little hands’ (‘The iris was yellow, the moon was pale’, pp. 111–12). The poem contains echoes of the celebrated sensual intimacy of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’. Elsewhere, Bradley describes the woman who was both her niece and lover as being of the fairy people.46 Together, Michael Field’s poem and Bradley’s memorable description of Cooper suggest that the ‘little hands’ were central to the intimacy between the two women who wrote as Michael Field. It is worth remembering here that one of Bradley’s pet names for Cooper, ‘Onycha’, drew into their intimate vocabulary the image of the fingernail. This erotic significance must not be lost in our understanding of the hand and shell imagery in this poem. The erotogenic charge of hands in ‘Blessed Hands’ is apparent in the very first line. How could fingers be virginal unless there was the possibility of their being otherwise? Offered to the lips, this is no innocent kiss, and the second stanza explicitly evokes an erotic union of lips and fingertips: ‘What of dew, kissed as it shone, / Wild rose I have fed upon — / Flesh that fortifies and wins, / Finger-tips forgiving sins!’ In the final stanza of part I, the acts of touching hands and then kissing them are connected with acts of prayer and devotion. Thus the amatory connotations of the hands are sanctified, and the flesh remains free from sin because these acts of love are performed in a spirit of devotion. Part II of ‘Blessed Hands’ elaborates the conceit of hands touching in prayer as an image of erotic contact between two like beings. Here the fingertips that rest on one another in the act of prayer are likened to molluscs with shells half-open on the seabed. The simile is complex. First, it conjures the image of a double shell, slightly open, yet with each half still in contact with the other, where the meeting of fingertips provides the hinge that combines the two halves. But there follows a line that

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dismisses the image of the one shell with two halves and introduces instead an image of two, separate, but identical, sea creatures bonding – ‘Shining valve with valve rose-red’ – in an unmistakably erotic union. This image reminds us of the bipartite Michael Field: two poets who merge in a single identity with two mirroring halves. Moreover, Bradley often talks of Edith’s shell-like charm. For example, in ‘A Picture’ (The Wattlefold, p. 194), which Bradley wrote on 29 July 1913 when she was nursing Cooper, Bradley muses on Cooper’s beauty, thinking of her face appearing ‘As a shell under water, secret, keen’. In this context, the intimate meanings of the ‘rose-red’ valves grow in intensity at the end of ‘Blessed Hands’. The poetic voice observes the sea lifting ‘your young and shell-like finger-tips / Up to the softest motion of my lips’. Here the fingertips – which are literally shell-like because the fingernails share some of the texture and opalescence of the seashell – carry a remarkable female homoeroticism. Thus the poem, which is ostensibly about a devout woman receiving the Church’s blessing, also articulates Bradley and Cooper’s heretical, pagan desire for each other. In ‘Blessed Hands’ Catholic devotion and same-sex eroticism co-exist – not crudely, but in a careful and sophisticated manipulation of literary and theological images. In short, the idea that the kiss that the ‘I’ gives to ‘you’ is ‘softer than a Bridegroom ever knew’ might denote not only the touch of the Holy Spirit but also the embrace that is unknown to men because it happens between two women. But that is not to say that Gray’s priestly presence is irrelevant to the eroticism between the two women which is at the core of this poem. The integration of pagan and Catholic in ‘Blessed Hands’ parallels the work of male poets who concentrated on the sensual body of Christ within Catholicism – from Hopkins to the likes of Gray and Raffalovich in the later nineteenth century. In his long tract on homosexuality, Uranisme et Unisexualite´, Raffalovich identifies ‘superior’ or ‘sublime’ inverts who are able to sublimate their sexual desires through, among other things, religion. When Raffalovich brings together religion and homosexuality, the result is a naturally noble being. Raffalovich’s description of (to quote Ellis Hanson’s excellent analysis and translation) ‘the love of the virginal uranist for his ‘‘young God, naked and bleeding, disfigured and transfigured, wounded and wounding’’ ’, shows a powerful system of imagery at work – one that was shared with Bradley and Cooper, as well as with Gray.47 In Uranisme et Unisexualite´, Raffalovich points to the writings of Angelus Silesius, Friedrich von Spee, St John of the Cross and St Teresa – all examples from a narrow range of the more exotic Christian texts – in order to make this comparison between the earthly lover of Christ and

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the lover that Richard von Krafft-Ebing describes in Psychopathia Sexualis as the homosexual. In particular, the fetishisation of the wounded male body (whether of Christ’s wounds or St Sebastian’s) is such an important emblem of male Catholic homosexuality at this time – one expressed most clearly by Raffalovich – that Michael Field’s ‘Blessed Hands’ must be read in light of it. For Michael Field, it seems the wounds of Christ are also central to their articulation of desire, but in this poem the ‘blessed hands’ that bear the stigmata manifest the ‘wound’ that is the mark of femininity and a specific female suffering. Again we see that cluster of ‘Erotic power, wound, need, hands’ that Lauretis identifies as the ‘signifiers of [lesbian] desire’.48 In her paper ‘ ‘‘Mighty Victims’’: Women Writers and the Feminization of Christ’, Julie Melnyk identifies a persistent androgynising or feminising of Christ during the nineteenth century (in the work of artists such as William Holman Hunt, and writers such as Felicia Hemans and Christina Rossetti), which might be seen to offer a form of empowerment to Victorian women. She concludes, however, that this avenue turned out to be ‘an ideological dead-end’ because not one woman writer was able entirely to leave behind the context of social powerlessness and suffering which this identification inevitably brought with it.49 This does not hold true for Bradley and Cooper, who, quite exceptionally amongst women (although not so unusually amongst the men with whom they associated), identify with Christ’s suffering not as a form of social powerlessness, but as a form of erotic transcendence. Once we recognise the femininity of the ‘wound’ which exists only implicitly within the poem, then we can understand how ‘Blessed Hands’ resonates with Gray’s homoerotic references to Christ’s stigmata in Spiritual Poems. While many of the works in Gray’s volume are translations, they are no less Gray’s poems for all that (as Hanson explains, Gray’s ‘art is not only in the translation, but in the selection’).50 For example, ‘Saint Bernard: To the Stabbed Side of Jesus’ – a translation from the German of Paulus Gerhardt – is an unflinching fetishisation of the wound: Save in thy wounded Side, for me There rests no consolation. O precious Wound, be thou adored, [ . . . .] Conceal me, Wound; within thy cave Locked fast, no thing shall harm me; There let me nestle close and safe, There soothe my soul and warm me.51

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A similarly telling paean to the wound is Gray’s poem on St John of the Cross (a figure whose importance will be developed later in this chapter), ‘They say, in other days’: He met the Lover of the Dark Night’s tryst; Saint John was folded in the hands of Christ. He lay upon their wounds, and wept the whole Of longing that was in his holy soul. Those molten hands were silent. [ . . . .] And John was locked within the riven Side. The Wound said: ‘Sleep, beloved, and be calm; I, in thy flesh, made wounds upon thee balm.’52

This use of Christ’s body and his wounds as an erotic interface between Gray and his religion no doubt influenced Michael Field’s work, but Bradley and Cooper concentrate particularly on the ‘hands’ of Christ in order to image, in this poem, a specifically female sexuality. Of course, Bradley and Cooper’s writing of their desire for each other within their religious passion is not limited to their subtle exploration of the proto-lesbian and Christ-like hands. The blurring or reconciling of Bradley and Cooper’s religious passion with their homoerotic desire, which runs so deep in the structure of ‘Blessed Hands’, can be found in much of their conversion poetry, cloaked in many different guises. But in the rest of this chapter I want to concentrate on their manipulation of just one such image, which weaves together, in a particularly colourful fashion, Michael Field’s concerns at the time of conversion and the influence of their priest and mentor: the Trinity. trinity Though we are Bacchic wanderers into this world of the highest & most perfect symbols, where the chalice is of salvation, we have been led to this there by the star of our lives & a star ‘in Oriente’ – our own Whym Chow, the light of our love, of our hearts, our spirits, our religion, our imaginations – Whym Chow, our Eastern Joy!53

Thus wrote Cooper in 1907, and there is no doubt that she felt strongly the lure – intellectually and emotionally – of Catholic symbolism; her conversations with her confessor were full of concern about the potential blasphemy of the fact that she loves Catholic iconology more than the reality of God and Christ’s life.54 In particular, Cooper was enthralled by

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the power of the Trinity. It is no accident, however, that in the above quotation the celebration of the higher symbols ends in a paean to the dead dog that had by this time become something of a ‘perfect symbol’ himself. It was Trinitarian theology which provided the two women with the most fully developed point of reconciliation or assimilation between their old life and their new faith, and Whym Chow’s symbolic afterlife played a crucial role in this system. Because the duality of Michael Field’s authorship has been so central to commentary on Bradley and Cooper’s poetry, the importance of the trinity in their work tends to be neglected.55 But the Holy Trinity is not only a point of reconciliation between Bradley and Cooper’s earthly desires and their religious passion but also a point of continuity between Michael Field’s earlier pagan and later Catholic poetry. The earlier work repeatedly configures pagan trinities in honour of Bacchus, in order to symbolise their love for each other. In Chapter 5, for example, I touched briefly on the significance of ‘Cowslip-Gathering’, in Underneath the Bough, which problematises the doubleness that is so important to Michael Field’s authorship. It suggests that an extra participant is necessary to bring about the mingling of the two writers: Twain cannot mingle: we went hand in hand, Yearning, divided, through the fair spring land, Nor knew, twin maiden spirits, there must be In all true marriage perfect trinity. (pp. 67–8)

This poem is already carrying echoes of the religious lyrics of Gerard Manley Hopkins in which the Trinity was used to reconcile two potentially antithetical terms;56 compare the above, for example, with ‘Summa’: The best ideal is the true And other truth is none. All glory be ascribe`d to The holy Three in One.57

In ‘Cowslip-Gathering’ the third party in the Trinity was Nature herself (with, as I noted earlier, a significant emphasis on the bee), who had ‘in one our very being blent’. But this third, who was needed to facilitate the unification of the two, and to sanctify the union, usually appeared (in their pre-1907 poetry) in the Bacchic figure of their dog, Whym Chow.

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At the time of their conversion, this threesome underwent a rapid and ingenious translation into a Holy Trinity. Rather than leave behind their triadic intimacy, its meaning was carefully adapted to their new faith in a fashion which is typical of Bradley and Cooper’s personal mythology, although it can look eccentric to modern eyes. The dog maintained its place in the triad even after its death, but the Trinity took on a very different aspect. This modulation from pagan trinity to Holy Trinity is part of a significant continuum in their thinking. Cooper claimed that: ‘For years I have worshipped the Holy Trinity, ever since I prayed, & Michael used to pray, for the little Earthly Trinity, Whym Chow, & Hennie [Cooper] & Michael [Bradley] to the ineffable Divine Trinity’.58 Bradley goes on in this passage to contrast ‘the Church of my childhood’, which lacked ‘universality in its rites’, with ‘The Bacchic joy of Benediction’.59 ‘The Bacchic joy of Benediction’ encapsulates that fusion of the pagan and the Christian that Bradley and Cooper found in Roman Catholicism, and it is this contradiction which allows for dog and God to have a strange affiliation where one is symbolically, as well as typographically, reflected in the other. The importance of Whym Chow to the two women and their symbolic system can not be overestimated. They were nearly deserted by their good friends Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon at the time of the dog’s death because of their loud and interminable grieving over it. Writing to Bradley and Cooper from his new house in Holland Park on 9 April 1906, Charles Ricketts asserts: ‘I am quite unable to face an interview with this excessive and dolorous lamentation still in your ways of speech’.60 In her recent study of human devotion to pet dogs, Marjorie Garber writes of the death of the family dog – presumably purchased as a puppy for very young children and so in its old age when they reach their teens – as symbolising, for the maturing children who love it, the end of their own childhood: ‘what is lost is both the canine companion and a sense of one’s own youth and innocence’.61 There is a sense in which Bradley and Cooper, too, came of age when their dog died, only in their case the loss of innocence was a result of the ageing of the century which was categorising desire and defining sexual norms. There is no doubt that the death of Whym Chow acquired a much greater significance for the two women than it might initially seem to merit because it came to symbolise a crisis of identity. I have already noted that Victorian women poets (including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Bronte¨ and Emily Dickinson) seem to have had a particular penchant for pets and often invested much in them. But

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Michael Field still represents an extreme case, and this depth of feeling must be recognised in order to make plausible what follows in this chapter. Whym Chow: Flame of Love is a luxurious mass for the dog (Katharine Pionke has argued persuasively that, although the volume doesn’t follow a strict liturgical sequence, it gestures towards the requiem structure at crucial points along the way),62 and contains poems which address the dog as a muse figure, or a beloved. Poem XXV, for example, begins ‘I want you, little Love’, and goes on to address the dog (pp. 50–2). Poem XXVIII takes the conventional desire of the lover to reunite with the dead beloved through his or her own death, and again transfers the trope to the death of the dog: When at the Door of Death, The white door with the knocker of coiled snakes, Shall I not cease even from my struggling breath, Will not my voice stand by my heart that quakes, And call, as life heaves from its mould to dust, Call, call for thee: but listen dumb If there is breeze of little breath up-thrust Against the other side, or happy thrum Of little feet upon the inner floor? If I but hear those sounds, the bar is gone [ . . . ]. (p. 56)

This poem is typical of some of the shamelessly bathetic work contained in Whym Chow that has rendered this volume so marginal to the Michael Field oeuvre. Yet the role the dog occupies within Bradley and Cooper’s poetic system at this time helps them to overcome significant anxieties about their erotic relationship in the context of their Catholic conversion, and the book is certainly significant in this respect. In much of this volume we see the pet chow dog as a mediator between the two women, binding them together: O Chow, the Peace of her I love above All else, O feeder of her heart forlorn, Sustainer of her torn, Conflicted Nature with a seamless love! (poem XXIX, p. 57)

Here the dog is a symbol of the love and care that each woman gives to the other: the dog is sent to feed the beloved’s heart, to sustain her and bring her peace. The ambiguity turning around ‘peace’ and ‘piece’, in the first line given above, is important to the relationship between writer and

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dog here. The imagery enmeshes ‘pieces’ of the lover with ‘pieces’ of the beloved by way of the intervening dog, producing a ‘seamless love’ which binds (more than the beloved’s ‘Conflicted Nature’) lover, beloved and dog into a pagan trinity. One of the most interesting poems in Whym Chow is simply called ‘Trinity’: I did not love him for myself alone: I loved him that he loved my dearest love. O God, no blasphemy It is to feel we loved in trinity, To tell Thee that I loved him as Thy Dove Is loved, and is Thy own, That comforted the moan Of Thy Beloved, when earth could give no balm And in Thy Presence makes His tenderest calm. So I possess this creature of Love’s flame, So loving what I love he lives from me; Not white, a thing of fire, Of seraph-plume`d limbs and one desire, That is my heart’s own, and shall ever be: An animal – with aim Thy Dove avers the same . . . . O symbol of our perfect union, strange Unconscious Bearer of Love’s interchange. (poem V, p. 15)

Here Whym Chow is an otherworldly presence, with his shaggy legs seen as ‘seraph-plume`d limbs’, and his russet coat declaring him a ‘creature of Love’s flame’. He is almost a red-coloured Cupid, figuring forth the women’s unity: a ‘symbol of our perfect union, strange / Unconscious Bearer of Love’s interchange’. However, the comparison in which Whym Chow stands to Bradley and Cooper as the dove stands to God is certainly striking, if not bizarre. The dove as Holy Spirit – the ineffable unifying spirit which forms the Holy Trinity with God and Christ – is the third member of the triad that also remains present within the other two. Similarly, Whym Chow is a unifying spirit that binds the two women in the trinity. In this complex figuration, Bradley and Cooper would seem to be reconciling their perfect erotic union with their Catholic faith by finding a new way to image their unity. It is ironic that, when Bradley first received Whym Chow as a gift from Edith and Amy,

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she wrote of this incarnation of their pagan spirit: ‘I will never make him a Christian dog. [ . . . ] He is Michael’s own little brimstone soul’.63 Yet in ‘Trinity’ the dog manages precisely to belong to both worlds. Many of the letters between Bradley and Gray discuss Trinitarian doctrine, and the women were clearly thinking about the issues in sophisticated terms. In ‘Trinity’, Bradley and Cooper theorise their relationship along the lines of the Trinitarian doctrine of St Augustine. By the end of the nineteenth century, the legacy of the Oxford Movement, and its interest in the early Church Fathers, had generated considerable interest in Augustinian thought. Augustine’s De Trinitate was translated and published in 1887, and it would seem to have exerted influence on Bradley and Cooper’s conversion poetry. Edmund Hill explains that in De Trinitate Augustine attempts direct or intellectual contact with God. God is love he muses, ‘So when we love and see our love and ourselves loving with it, surely we see God’.64 Eventually, however, Augustine decides that we cannot penetrate directly and immediately into the inmost being of God. We can, however, perhaps become more thoroughly acquainted with the divine mystery by looking at it indirectly, through its reflection or image in ourselves. The image that Augustine suggests we know God by is that of the trinity of love, lover and beloved.65 This structure helps us comprehend Bradley and Cooper’s interest in their dog. If they are lover and beloved respectively, then Whym Chow is pure love. Together, the three of them comprise the image of the Holy Trinity by which Augustine believes we can apprehend God. Thus, Augustine gave Michael Field a way of allowing body and soul, sensuality and spirituality to come together in an image which celebrates their intimacy on earth as a route to understanding the divine. The critic Edmund Hill suggests we interpret Augustine’s notion of the Holy Spirit as ‘the relationship of being Gift, the relationship of ‘‘giveness’’ if you like’: ‘he is the gift of both the Father and the Son’.66 Similarly, for Bradley and Cooper Whym Chow features as the gift given by each to the other. As such, the gift that is Whym Chow enshrines love: ‘I did not love him for myself alone: / I loved him that he loved my dearest love’. Line eleven (‘So loving what I love he lives from me’) makes little sense unless placed within this doctrinal context which sees Whym Chow as a gift of love which goes out from one to the other – not only as something that is a part of the giver but also as a gift with an independent existence that becomes a part of the recipient. Thus Whym Chow for

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Bradley and Cooper, like the Holy Spirit for Augustine, is ‘a kind of inexpressible communion or fellowship of Father and Son’ – or, in Michael Field’s case, of the aunt and the niece.67 At this point, we need to turn to Bradley and Cooper’s correspondence with Gray once more in order to show how Michael Field figured this particular trinity. In an undated letter to Gray, Bradley describes the period of mourning that followed Whym Chow’s death and her temporary despair: I was quietly told of Heaven; that we three Henry, Whymmie, & Michael were accepted – to reflect as in a dark pond – the Blessed Trinity. It is our Mystery – it is our secret. In return for our blasphemy, Whymmie returned to us to be our guardian angel [ . . . ] & little living Flame of Love. He is my little Fellow, as Henry is my Fellow.68

Michael Field thus conceived that the blasphemous pagan trinity should be translated and accepted as their own earthly reflection of the Holy Trinity. Of course, it is no coincidence that in this Holy Trinity the two women occupy the positions of the Father and the Son – a not inappropriate metaphor for an aunt and niece who also share a special bond with each other. By seeing themselves as parts of the Holy Trinity, Bradley and Cooper image their special, and much-proclaimed, distinctness within unity with reference to the most sacred family unit.69 Yet one wonders how much this analogy was a defensive gesture, designed at some level to explain the closeness of their bond, whilst guarding against anxieties about its nature. If it is appropriate to consider whether Bradley and Cooper might have been anxious about being diagnosed by new definitions of the female homosexual, we must also consider whether sexological thinking about incest may also have been a concern. KrafftEbing condemned incest as follows: The preservation of the moral purity of family life is a product of civilization; and feelings of intense displeasure arise in an ethically intact man at thought of lustful feeling towards a member of the same family. Only great sensuality and defective ideas of laws and morals can lead to incest.70

Freud also saw such feelings as deeply perverse and identifies any infantile incestuous tendencies as normally violently repressed in childhood. At much the same time, Havelock Ellis formulates a more accepting view.

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‘The occasional slight sexual attraction between near relations in early life and its usual disappearance at puberty or adolescence are thus both alike natural and normal’, he writes.71 Ellis believes that boys and girls brought up together will, however, be so familiar with each other that the sensory stimulation they offer will be inadequate to arouse sexual excitement of each other.72 Incest, whether strongly condemned, or naturally avoided, was openly described and defined at the end of the nineteenth century. Of course, Bradley and Cooper’s relationship was, under any interpretation, a long way from the cases which were cited in sexological textbooks. In Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing’s examples usually involve fathers preying on their daughters, or interest between brothers and sisters. Very little evidence of incest between two females is given.73 In her work on the ‘Lesbian incest effect’, Sarah Annes Brown discusses sister incest within Victorian pornography alongside other examples from nineteenth-century fiction such as ‘Goblin Market’ and Little Women.74 She weaves these examples together to argue for a nineteenth-century narrative of lesbian incest. Yet, although the fictional scenes do take part in a history of intimate, even erotic, narratives between related women, they do not figure ‘incest’ in the sense in which it clearly was recognised in the period. Likewise, Bradley and Cooper did situate their relationship within a discourse of close female ties, but was it in danger of appearing incestuous? Chris White has examined Michael Field’s ability to use diverse sources for their language of love, ‘but never noticeably the language of bloodrelatives’.75 Recent critics have rarely paid attention to the incestuous aspect of Bradley and Cooper’s relationship, and for good reason. In the letters, diaries and poetry of Michael Field the issue simply does not arise. But, at a level probably not even articulated within their private thoughts, Bradley and Cooper were unlikely to have been entirely immune from worries about its new visibility in the age of sexology. Their identification with the Trinity can be read, in part, as a defensive gesture at a time when they were extremely concerned with accommodating all aspects of their life and their relationship within the Church. So, if there is any hint of repressed incest anxiety, then it is located in this identification with Father and Son. This is a familial identification that neutralises and legitimises the intense erotic bond between aunt and niece: ‘O symbol of our perfect union’. If we can detect some plausibility in Bradley and Cooper figuring themselves in the roles of God and Christ in ‘Trinity’, what might we

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make of their portrayal of Whym Chow as the Holy Spirit? To answer this question more fully, we need to turn to the homosexual Catholicism that Gray represented to Michael Field. More specifically, we need to focus on Gray’s most esteemed biblical figure: St John of the Cross. It is no coincidence that St John of the Cross was also obsessed by the Trinity, but his work, particularly, appealed to both Gray and Michael Field because he wrote mystic love poetry as sensuous as the ‘Song of Songs’.76 He exemplified the perfect reconciliation of luxurious poetry and religious doctrine.77 In Spiritual Poems, Gray translated and included a number of verses attributed to this saint. In November 1908 he writes of his ‘invincible love of St John of the Cross’, explaining that St John ‘made a hole in the covering which I had woven about myself to hide me from God’.78 Hanson observes that ‘The image of the hole in Gray’s covering, rendering him vulnerable to God, is especially suggestive given that, in Gray’s hands, the translation of [St John of the Cross’s] ‘‘The Obscure Night of the Soul’’ reads more than ever like a Decadent and homoerotic love poem’.79 If, however, one looks to other letters where Gray refers to the importance of St John, then one sees that the saint, at least in Gray’s retrospective memorialising, is part of a discourse of assimilation as well as penetration. In January 1908, Gray writes of a time when ‘I used to lie in bed, having at the time a brown eiderdown & brown bed curtains reading a brown book – works of St. John of the Cross’.80 St John seems, in this quotation, to be blended into the embracing environment of the bedchamber, enabling him to be equated with sensuous protection as well as being the means by which Gray is made exposed and vulnerable. This combination is also to be found in Michael Field’s work where St John is connected with a terrifying baring of the soul, but is at the same time assimilated into Michael Field’s domestic world through another colour connection – this time, as we shall see, involving the russet red of their chow dog. For both Gray and Michael Field, St John marks an erotic tension between, on the one hand, self-exposure, and, on the other hand, a sensuous assimilation of the self imagined through the experience of lying in a curtained bed and of touching the fur coat of a beloved dog. Michael Field’s identification with St John is clear throughout Whym Chow: Flame of Love. The title of the volume not only marks a personal reference to the pet dog’s flame-coloured coat, but also alludes to St John’s The Living Flame of Love – his most sensual and personal poem, which Gray partly translated but eventually excluded from Spiritual

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Poems. Bradley’s letters record her asking Gray specifically for the loan of this volume: Then of S. John of the Cross! Oh that I could read him with quiet heart! [ . . . .] (Will you – can you [–] lend me his Spiritual Canticle & ‘Living Flame of Love’. [ . . . .] I cannot speak of the new life I am getting from St. John – perhaps this is best – not a drop of the precious emotion is wasted – it is all wanted for the Spirit to use.)81

The Living Flame – the most sublime account that St John gave of the spiritual life – is addressed to a woman, Don˜a Ana de Pen˜alosa, a rich widow who placed herself under his direction. There is also a prose commentary written to accompany the poem, which speaks of the Holy Spirit as a purgatorial flame, and the gradual operation of fire upon the soul: ‘The soul feels itself to be at last wholly enkindled in Divine union, its palate to be wholly bathed in glory and love [ . . . .] The soul addresses this flame, which is the Holy Spirit’.82 As Robert Sencourt explains, ‘the Living Flame becomes a long argument for the mystery, the freedom, and the splendor of God’s direct action upon the soul’:83 O love with living flames that climb Profound and dear the sear sublime, Thine ardour has begun. Since thou’rt no longer hard to please, Devour with thine imperial ease The web our meeting spun. O scald and sear of purest love, O wound enjoyed all ease above, O delicate, soft touch Of hand which every ransom pays And savours of eternal days And slaying, quickens much!84

How, then, does this reference in the volume’s title to St John’s Living Flame affect our reading of ‘Trinity’? For a start, Gray’s avocation of the teaching of St John explains Michael Field’s repeated description, in correspondence with Gray, of the loss of the dog as their ‘sacrifice’, which brought them nearer to God. Bradley writes: I knew nothing of sacrifice till I offered one. It has been accepted. To my dear Henry the pain was worse – for she loved him most and from this I have learnt all I know of the sacrifice in the bosom of the Trinity, and the search light you must cast-in on my blasphemy – and God rewarded that – so!

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St John repeatedly ‘insists on the needs of sacrifice, of effort, of suffering, of generosity’;85 indeed, his capacity for suffering is one of the most notable features of his story. Correspondingly, Bradley and Cooper’s suffering, together with the sacrifice of the dove (or dog), places them firmly on St John’s preferred road to God, and thus assures Gray’s approval. It is also important that ‘Trinity’ is addressed, potentially blasphemously, to an object of earthly love. Michael Field’s engagement with The Living Flame of Love provided Bradley and Cooper with a further opportunity to legitimise their quest to incorporate their love for each other into an apprehension of the divine. Moreover, St John’s poem enabled the presence of Whym Chow in the Trinity to be fleshed out in sacred terms, with the nice conceit of the russet-coloured dog becoming a metaphor for the purgatorial ‘flame’ that would cleanse the two women of blame for their previous blasphemy. To quote St John’s commentary: The soul is completely absorbed in these delicate flames, and wounded subtly by love in each of them, and in all of them together more wounded and deeply alive in the love of the life of God, so that it can see quite clearly that that love belongs to life eternal, which is the union of all blessings.86

This extract helps us see why Michael Field’s ‘creature of Love’s flame’ figures forth the Holy Spirit. Whym Chow is not the Paraclete or white dove, but John’s flame – ‘a thing of fire’. Bradley and Cooper have absorbed the male homosexual discourse of Catholic desire Gray communicated to them, but they have also twisted it in unexpected ways in order to integrate it with their own personal mythology and to make it reflect their erotic identity. In this trinity the dog is the symbol of the love between the women. This animal can reflect back to the poets their identity as lovers, and the union of their dual authorship, within the sanctified space of the Trinity. The role of the dog, after its death, in the poetry of Michael Field did not simply indicate a descent into bathos. Something very significant is being worked out in these poems, which are too easily dismissed. Finally, it also becomes clear throughout this discussion that the attention given to the duality of Bradley and Cooper’s textual persona and authorship misses the significance of their investment in the trinity (pagan and Catholic) throughout their oeuvre and particularly in the later poetry. It is inevitable that the ‘I’/‘you’ (poet/muse) dialectic, so important to much Victorian poetry, will take the form of a threesome when ‘I’ is already doubled. In the figure of the Trinity in Michael Field’s poetry, then,

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religious, erotic and textual concerns are united and reconciled. ‘True marriage’, indeed, we find in this ‘perfect trinity’. The main themes of the poetry of this period are reflected in the drama Borgia. Published in 1905, this play takes as its subject the Italian Renaissance and the family of Pope Alexander VI. The pearl is a central icon, which signifies the riches and tears that motivate this treacherous world. According to Ricketts, the research that went into this Catholic play was a direct cause of Cooper’s conversion.87 Here the Pope and his children, Cesare and Lucrezia, form a kind of unholy trinity of their own, united in their aim to support Cesare’s military campaigns. Indeed, the three are so intertwined that the continued existence of both father and sister seems imperative to Cesare’s own life: he swears he will ensure his father lives for many more years, and he sickens as his father becomes ill. Later on, he, somewhat bizarrely, requests that his sickening sister swear an oath not to die: ‘I promise you, / If you will pledge me to remain alive, / That I will vanquish all my enemies. / But I must have the oath’ (IV.v, p. 123). The three really do seem to be parts of one being. Within this triadic relationship, there is even rumour of incest between brother and sister; something that is developed as a strong theme throughout the play. On Lucrezia’s second marriage – to Lord Cardinal Ippolito d’Este – Alexander orders Cesare to ‘Dance with your sister. / My stars, my Gemini! Lead forth the Duchess . . . ’. The following stage directions (preceding the rather sexually charged dance) depict a flirtatious scene in which Cesare whispers in Lucrezia’s ear; she turns white, then blushes and casts her eyes to the ground (IV.ii, pp. 109–10). In a distortion of Eve Sedgwick’s triangular relationship ‘between men’, here the primary relationship is between brother and sister, and the sister shows willing to marry with a view to cementing that bond. This explicit broaching of an incest anxiety within the cover of the Holy Trinity should support my reading, above, of the more implicit rendering of the trinity discussed in relation to the poetry. Tellingly, this play also contains a short scene devoted to a charged encounter between Lucrezia and an anchoress which focuses on Lucrezia’s devotional fondling of Suor Lucia’s hands. Suor Lucia has recently proclaimed the miraculous appearance of Christ’s stigmata on her hands, but has no sign to show those who flock to her cave in search of proof. She is impressed by Lucrezia’s ‘perfect faith’ in her claim, even though Suor Lucia’s hands are ‘only striped / Where I have touched the oxen’s leather thongs’ (III.v, pp. 85–7). This short encounter between two women over the stigmataed hand is, in the play, a gnomic moment,

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designed to show the hope for the survival of true Catholic faith in this corrupt and self-seeking land (a moment which, arguably, can be seen to prefigure Bradley and Cooper’s own conversion). Yet in the poetry the latent eroticism of the scene is developed and the potential of this image is more fully explored as an encounter between aunt and niece when the former comes to the latter for benediction. flame of love or camp fire? Such a serious consideration of a volume of poetry dedicated to a pet dog may seem inappropriate; and there is no denying that the poetry of this later period, even when it is as complex and well-wrought as ‘Trinity’, sometimes has a deliriously Camp quality to it. This is an issue which should not be side-stepped, but which has been tackled by only one critic thus far. Katharine Pionke uses Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp’ to argue that Whym Chow appears Camp because the two women are so serious about their requiem for the dog, even though such attentions seem ‘if not [ . . . ] hilarious, then at least [ . . . ] incredulous’.88 Yet she concludes that the women’s reactions to the dog are ‘simultaneously serious and frivolous’.89 This combination of seriousness and frivolity is definitive of the Campy quality in Michael Field’s work, and leads me to reject Sontag’s theory of Camp which doesn’t allow for this knowingness on the part of the producer. For Sontag, Camp is a strategy of perception, rather than a strategy of creation: ‘To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role’, while pure Camp itself is always naı¨ve (my emphasis). Camp which knows itself to be Camp is ‘usually less satisfying’.90 In order to clarify my sense of Bradley and Cooper’s Camp, I first need to distinguish between Camp and kitsch in a rather different way from Sontag.91 In everyday parlance the distinction we observe with these terms is precisely that between a knowing (and creative) strategy of selfperformance on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fate of an object which was created in all seriousness but which has been decontextualised and ironised by a sophisticated observer. The difference is primarily one of agency. Kitsch items are almost always objects that were created as aspirantstylish design items; it is future generations who reinstate them with a different meaning. Camp, on the other hand is a quality which people can embody - a sure sign that we should look for greater elements of agency here. In his substantial analysis of fin-de-sie`cle Camp, Dennis Denisoff offers evidence for Camp being a ‘conscious undertaking’ in this period.92 I suggest that kitsch is in fact Sontag’s ‘seriousness that fails’ (and usually a

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seriousness from another generation), while Camp is much better defined as a seriousness which laughs at itself. This is the paradox of the fetish: of simultaneous avowal and disavowal. Camp is the strategy of those outside the status quo: those who are in a position to be rather detached from their interaction with the world. In order to understand Michael Field’s poetry, it is necessary to appreciate that Bradley and Cooper were at one level aware, and in control, of this humorous quality, while being absolutely sincere about their grief and their feelings for the dog. I’m not sure whether we are seeing Michael Field gently laughing at Bradley and Cooper’s seriousness, or Bradley and Cooper having a wry smile at Michael Field’s effusions, but I am convinced that the Camp quality is not unselfconscious. When the women convert to Catholicism (that strange inversion of the earlier experience with the Skye terrier), it is no coincidence that the reader of the diaries can laugh at the absurdity of the God/dog interchange: this absurdity is Bradley and Cooper’s own witty interpretation of the tragically serious events in their life, and this is what makes their work Camp, or, in Christopher Isherwood’s terminology, ‘high Camp’.93 Why else would Whym Chow have ended up covered in russet suede to mimic the dead dog’s coat? This textual taxidermy is more aware of its status as the last of a long line of Victorian pet elegies than we might initially credit, and Bradley and Cooper are more knowing taxidermists than we might want to believe. Michael Field’s twentieth-century poetry, although more overtly Camp, continues the serious process begun in Wild Honey. Of course, the women were not without moments of doubt about this extraordinary paradoxical reconciliation of pagan and Catholic desire. Such anxiety is shown in ‘Trinity’ itself, of course, through the lines ‘O God, no blasphemy / It is to feel we loved in trinity’. Similarly, in an undated letter to John Gray, Bradley tellingly adds a postscript which reads, ‘I am a little scared at our invocation of the Trinity [ . . . ] you will know what is right – in this ‘‘supernatural life’’ one must of course perpetually invoke the Holiest’.94 This occasional anxiety is an inevitable part of a process that aimed to allow the past to live on, somehow, in a Catholic present and future that should involve its denial. McCormack tells us of a statuette which stood on Gray’s mantelpiece ‘shrouded from head to foot’ because this commission from Eric Gill (depicting a man weeping for his sins) was deemed, on arrival, to be too fleshly for general display. McCormack also reports how Gray kept his Decadent first editions still on his shelves, but with their spines ‘mysteriously turned toward the wall’. If a visitor

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picked up one of these books, ‘it would without comment be gently lifted from his hand and replaced’.95 Bradley clearly identified with this need. Her letters to John Gray express a similar terror of ‘those eighties, & their damnable aestheticism’ but at the same time admit there have been moments when she has cursed its loveliness. Although Bradley concedes that she ‘did seek to flee’ the fin de sie`cle, she also acknowledges ‘the work of those eighties & early nineties – the good & vital work of Oscar – rising up from the folly – the good & the harm of Pater – your work – ours!’96 This ambivalence characterises Michael Field’s desire to reveal and acknowledge the past, while also rewriting its meaning. Even when visiting St Peter’s (Gray’s Edinburgh church), Edith comments in her diary: I am led over planks to see the library where the cornice will frame the bookshelves as walls & the parlour that is to be canary-coloured with black paint (Dear me! St Peter! we are all of the 80 eighties in spite of ourselves, of conversion & change!)97

I began by stating that Bradley and Cooper appear to have managed the task of rewriting and incorporating their past much more successfully than Gray (in spite of his aesthetically coloured church parlour), and Michael Field certainly appears to have a much more deliberate textual strategy. One could say that Gray’s letters to Michael Field helped Bradley and Cooper succeed where he had failed – in constructing an artful whole where the imagery and symbolism of past poetry was rewritten and given new meaning within Catholicism. While Gray burned Silverpoints, they incorporated their earlier life and work into a multi-layered palimpsest which enabled a synchronic fusion of pre- and post-conversion symbols. The dog became particularly significant to this endeavour, and perhaps the best summary of the temporal mediation performed by the chow dog is contained in Cooper’s outpouring in the diary after his death where she refers to him as ‘the moment eternal of the Bacchic God – the inspirer of life, our sunbeam, our instant torch – our Now-Now’.98 As the eternal ‘now’, the dog represents the moment that is both within a temporal system and yet always outside of it: the moment in which past, present and future can coexist and be reconciled. Whym Chow might appear the most Victorian of volumes: its sentimentalism, its elegiac nature, and its concern with an animal subject, bring to mind Matthew Arnold’s pet elegies, for instance.99 But it is precisely the self-conscious Camp of this volume that alerts us to the fact that this is not taking part in that nineteenth-century tradition in any

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simple way. This volume comments on its Victorian pedigree but only to fit it into a bigger system in which both nineteenth and twentieth century, as well as world history, play a part. The serious ambitions of Wild Honey for a ‘modern’ poetic may seem to have been overtaken with Camp, but this is not the regression it appears to most critics. The religious poetry forms the culmination of the personal historical-poetic trajectory traced throughout this study – without which we misunderstand much of the significance of the earlier work – but it is also crucial to our wider understanding of late aestheticism in the early twentieth century. Michael Field’s work of this period represents an extreme form of that vertiginous, yet serious, textual playfulness that Jonathan Freedman tells us was rejected and evaded by high modernism and only recovered much later in the century.100

Conclusion: modernism and the fin de sie`cle

I began this book by thinking of Michael ‘Field’ as an experimental field. This image of mutually influencing forces captures the essence of the dynamic underpinning Michael Field’s poetry. There are many different dramas of influence played out within the space of the Michael Field signature, but, as I argued in Chapter 1, ‘Michael Field’ might ultimately be read as an interpretation of Bradley and Cooper’s lives that allows their story to be mediated and shaped as it progresses. This two-way interaction between the women and Michael Field allows their story to attain a coherence usually only managed in retrospect. For example, the conclusion of their story (in the return to the Church) seems to be embedded within their interpretive framework from the beginning. In the back, lining, page of the 1907 diary, is written the following: ‘Do you know what the name ‘‘Michael’’ means? ‘‘one who is like God’’. & we may well believe he watches over those who have that name written in their hearts’.1 As Frederick Roden astutely observes, ‘Approaching their end, Katherine [sic] and Edith did not distinguish the events in their lives from the passion of Christ’ – and, further, it is as if this conflation was presented as an inevitable development of the story, contained as a seed from the moment they took the name ‘Michael’ several decades ago.2 There is no doubt that Michael Field enables Bradley and Cooper actually to live aesthetically as well as to write aesthetically. In this region in which one can observe the ‘way in which bodies are able to influence each other’ across time and space, the most striking configuration is that of the paradox. As I have shown, every volume of poetry is based around a different dialectic, which is crafted into a poetic paradox; and this is clearly central to an aestheticist mode of experience. Yet it is the paradoxes across space and time that unify Bradley and Cooper’s poetic, and which raise the most fundamental questions about the lyric genre. While the post-Romantic lyric frequently appears to aspire to the atemporal and the solitary – a timeless statement made 201

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outside historical contingencies by a visionary voice that has no place in the social world – Bradley and Cooper’s internal dramatisation of the lyric shows us how much the genre is in fact defined by its operations within time and space. The dual authorship is crucial to this ability to experiment with the lyric in the spatial dimension, and the solipsism of the lyric voice is challenged within the space of Michael Field at the time when it was becoming enmeshed within more general worries about the ‘modern’ world. But ultimately it is the temporal dimension of the lyric with which Michael Field is most interestingly concerned – and it is this which defines the preoccupations of the aestheticist lyric more generally. More specifically, it is the fusing of synchronic and diachronic structures that is a continuous theme throughout Michael Field’s poetry, and this temporal paradox can be traced across all the published volumes, no matter what their primary conceit. In Chapter 2 I outlined a fetishistic strategy which acts as a vehicle for paradox, and which found temporal paradox, specifically, underlying the volume in the authors’ literary connection with Sappho. The women also find this paradox at the heart of the generic paradox of ekphrasis (Chapter 3), and as a crucial part of their own dual authorship which finally has to negotiate the relationship between two voices across time as well as space (Chapter 4). By the time they write Wild Honey, this temporal paradox has become apparent within the function of the bee image and the role it plays in organising the narrative of the volume (Chapter 5). From this point onwards the dialectic between ‘pagan’ and ‘Catholic’ forms the frame for their poetry, as consecutive phases in history as well as moments that can be invoked synchronically to capture those large cycles of time which enable the individual to transcend the transient (Chapter 6). It is worth remembering at this point that both Darwin’s science of universal flux, and the clock paradox of Einstein’s special relativity theory of 1905, brought the relationship between diachronicity and synchronicity to general public consciousness. Michael Field’s engagement with this dialectic produced a vision of the ‘multiform life’ – as Cooper accesses it in her semi-conscious fever-induced visions – in which one can be simultaneously ‘Greek, Roman, Barbarian, Catholic’.3 Cooper has this vision when she is battling with high fever, but the women’s whole life and work is couched in just these delirious terms – in the diaries, as well as the poetry. (Such terms are no doubt connected, in part, with the metaphysical influence I traced in Chapter 4; see Alice Meynell’s approving note on the Metaphysicals: ‘It was not good sense they desired, it was delirium. They aimed at ecstasy’.)4 This ecstatic state – which

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literally involves the putting out of place – is characterised by an acknowledgement of the chronological while simultaneously managing to displace that temporal order and experience those moments synchronically. This is, of course, the structuring paradox of the lyric generically as it constantly negotiates between its own diachronic structure (working within time) and its attempt to present a synchronic, timeless, moment (aspiring to be outside it). But it is also more specifically definitive of the ‘aesthetic poetry’ that Pater describes in his essay of that name, in which that dichotomy became particularly urgent, and visible.5 Bradley and Cooper figure this dilemma in a most exaggerated form – as if manifesting, through their lives as well as their work, a commentary on aestheticism. What Pater works through in the life of Marius, Bradley and Cooper embody in Michael Field. In Pater’s novel we hear how: there would come, together with that precipitate sinking of things into the past, a desire to retain ‘what was so transitive’. Could he but arrest for others also, certain clauses of experience, as that imaginative memory presented them to himself! In those grand, hot summers, he would have imprisoned the very perfume of the flowers. To create – to live, perhaps, a little beyond the allotted span, in some fragment even, of perfect expression – was the form his longing took, for something to hold by and rest on, amid the perpetual flux.6

This is the theory Bradley and Cooper put into practice in their own story. As a commentary on the women’s lives, ‘Michael Field’ allows Bradley and Cooper, to situate themselves within larger patterns of history (as a lived experience, not just a retrospective interpretation), which provide a pattern ‘to hold by’ while simultaneously recognising the inevitable ‘perpetual flux’. Indeed Marius’s desire to imprison ‘the very perfume of the flowers’ in those hot summers, so that it could live on a little, a ‘fragment [ . . . ] of perfect expression’, is enacted in Michael Field’s honey imagery: the golden preservative which allows a meadow of spring flowers to be conserved like insects in amber. It is this personal embodiment of the central principles of aestheticism, as well as Michael Field’s particularly profound and detailed engagement with Pater’s formal historicism, that is unique – and which makes this author simultaneously central and (because of the exaggerated nature of their engagement) marginal to aestheticism. Jonathan Freedman observes that attempts within aestheticism to hold a temporal paradox ‘are not sustained for long: they, too, rapidly move toward an acceptance of dichotomy and irresolution’.7 Not so for Michael Field. For Bradley and Cooper, temporal paradox is established and maintained with an almost

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religious zeal. It is crucial to the nature of their personal identity, as well as their artistic schema, that it not collapse into dichotomy and irresolution. On a quite mundane level the temporal paradox allows the women to claim their close association with artists of the past. This entails both the humility of acknowledging their debt, but also the arrogance of linking themselves with canonical figures and writing themselves into a very visible history. On a personal level, this paradox was crucial to them because it allowed them to heal the rift they fashioned between what they style as the pagan and Catholic phases in their lives, and lifestyles. Yet it also fulfils a more deep-seated imperative. The temporal paradox is the means by which Michael Field turn the conundrums of life into art. Their art is successful because it allows us to transcend the dialectical nature of our existence. The paradoxical unification of the synchronic and the diachronic is central to this endeavour because it allows art to transcend that most pressing of contradictions in life: that we are creatures who live in time, and yet we have to face the fact that it is this dynamic which will inevitably take us out of time. In other words, the unification of these two temporal modes is important, finally, as a way of coping with the fact of mortality. Peter Allan Dale writes that: Carlyle, Arnold, and Pater were trying in their different but not unrelated ways to make poetry or art a viable substitute for a religious belief which had been thoroughly undermined by the historicist spirit. From one standpoint, the study of the influence of historicism on poetics is a study of the attempt to find in aesthetic experience something to compensate for the dissolution of religious belief under pressure of the contemporary Zeitgeist.8

This is an intellectual history into which Michael Field must be placed: not just because Bradley and Cooper’s work represents a valuable – and previously unacknowledged – part of it, but, more importantly, because they stand out in their attempt to combine their life and their art so closely. This leads to an aesthetic which displays a particularly intricate and complex relationship between the life-writing and the verse, and a body of work whose value, as I have shown in my close readings, lies in its particularly rich and inventive conceits. I have written about this obsession with time and history primarily within the context of nineteenth-century models. Ironically, this seems to suggest that, even while Bradley and Cooper were depicting themselves in the diaries as so very ‘modern’, they are doing so in terms which inscribe them firmly back into the past century. Yet the work of Michael Field had as

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much of a place in the new century as it did in the old. In this book I have defined a specifically turn-of-the-century environment that shares a good deal with the serious playfulness of postmodernist text. Yet one might wonder whether this risks underplaying the interest of the line of influence that inevitably existed between aestheticist writers and modernism. Ezra Pound’s scholarly engagement with the 1890s establishes an intricate web of poetic engagement which is as often overlooked in critics’ mapping of the fin de sie`cle as it is in our understanding of modernism. This lineage is demonstrated particularly clearly in Pound’s essay on Lionel Johnson that appears in T. S. Eliot’s selected essays of Ezra Pound. This consists in large part of notes sent by Johnson to Katharine Tynan (and which she published after his death). The very dynamic of this essay – which layers Johnson’s commentary on the 1890s (written in 1895), Tynan’s later reproduction of these notes (in 1907), and Pound’s even later essay (of 1915) through Eliot’s editorial control (in 1954) – charts a continuous lineage that is so often lost in a criticism too fixed within period boundaries and the modernist myth of discontinuity. Pound’s essay begins by praising Johnson for ‘poems as beautiful as any in English’, and singling him out from the ‘muzziness’ of the 1890s.9 Pound then reproduces Johnson’s notes on his 1890s contemporaries as evidence of Johnson’s good judgement. Here, the poets picked out for discussion are William Watson, John Davidson, Richard Le Gallienne, Arthur Symons, Francis Tompson and Michael Field. (Johnson compliments most vociferously Field’s dramatic work, noting that Michael Field’s work lacks the ‘mincing delicacy’ which is ‘the prevailing fashion’.)10 If the connection between Victorian poetry and modernism has continued to be critically neglected in recent decades, then this is even more true in the case of Victorian poetry written by women.11 While Michael Field’s work has been recovered since the 1990s under the banner of ‘Victorian women’s poetry’, there has been a marked reluctance to read such women poets as looking towards the future as well as the past. It is as if a tacit assumption about the conservative nature of fin-de-sie`cle women’s poetry always pulls it back into the Victorian. Yet Johnson and Pound recognised that Michael Field’s work holds a place in the turn-of-the-century literary landscape, and it is in this light that I re-read the poetry one last time. The easiest way to trace Michael Field’s trajectory into the twentieth century is through a writer who is closely aligned with Bradley and Cooper’s poetic and metapoetic experiments: W. B. Yeats. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that they had a significant influence on his work. Bradley and Cooper met Yeats in 1902, through Thomas Sturge Moore,

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when he and Cooper were both in their thirties. (At this time Yeats expressed an interest in staging Michael Field’s tragedy Deirdre at the Abbey theatre, but he eventually turned it down and produced his own play by the same name in 1907.)12 After commenting on Yeats’s irritating gestures, and the hair – ‘dribble[ing] in a Postlethwaite manner on to his brow’ – that she wants to shear with her grape-scissors, Cooper notes in the diary that ‘He knows our plays well & seems to care for them with insight. I was not prepared for this – but Dowden fired him with them in youth when he was at Dublin University’.13 The following poem, from Wild Honey, was based on a newspaper cutting, tucked inside the back of the 1906 volume of the diary, which reported the story of a woman singing all night to distract a mountain lion which had her in its clutches: It fell to a woman, wayfaring In a lone forest, a lion came that way, Laying his paw upon her heart. Soft from that heart below She sang to him night long: He cannot do her wrong Such sounds to his nostrils blow. Forever, forever I must sing, Forever and with mortality at bay, Must not grow weary or start – Things that I do not know Driven to me in song, Stories the graves among, Strange words in a spell that flow. (‘A Forest Night’, p . 70)

This faux-Scheherazade moment dramatises vividly the dreaded solipsism of the modern poet (imaged quintessentially in Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance), and pre-empts those verses in which Yeats, writing in his solitary tower, weaves himself into a web of historical interconnection that keeps him out of the cul-de-sac of introspection. In spite of the lengths Wild Honey goes to in order to heal the rift opening up between the economic and aesthetic, the above poem alludes to the risk that the poet will no longer be in touch with an audience, and that poetry will become a private singing against the gathering gloom of the poet’s own mortality. Certainly, Yeats is well-known to have been concerned that modern art was aligned with abstraction – and what I have observed in Michael Field’s work needs to be compared with his strategies for opposing this dissolution.

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Yeats, too, structures his poetic system around a negotiation between personal history and world history. In a description rather familiar from what I described in Chapter 1, Richard Ellmann notes Yeats’s impetus, ‘to seek always for patterns and pictures, and to hack and hew at his life until it reached the parabolic meaningfulness he found necessary’.14 This is what Edward Engelberg terms the search for ‘a marriage between the reckless moment of life and the formal moment of art’.15 Like Michael Field, Yeats sees his involvement with drama and the theatre as a crucial impetus towards achieving this reconciliation within his poetry. His use of the mask, like Bradley and Cooper’s, allows the self to be dramatised and distanced from the arbitrary pattern of everyday life. Similarly, while Yeats was in sympathy with the compact art of the modern lyric poem, he regretted the loss of larger-scale mythic design. Indeed, Yeats’s own, welldocumented, concern with the narrative of his books serves a purpose similar to Michael Field’s. The overarching narratives and image systems I have traced in volumes such as Underneath The Bough and Wild Honey are reflected in Yeats’s belief that the single image or unifying concept could combine personal lyric significance with universal meaning.16 Like Bradley and Cooper, Yeats was particularly influenced by Pater, so similarities are in good part the result of having a shared master, yet it is impossible not to recognise some areas of his work that seem particularly indebted to Michael Field. A Vision, developed many years later than Michael Field’s historical system, is the key to Yeats’s attempt to link micro- and macro-history.17 It gives us Yeats’s version of the alternation of Pagan (‘antithetical’) and Christian (‘primary’) eras within the movement of interpenetrating gyres.18 Like Michael Field, Yeats sought progression through contraries: for him, too, cycles within history allow for both the diachronic flux and the synchronic moment. These historical motions – in Yeatsian terms, up and down, in and out, contracting and expanding – became the defining metaphors of Yeats’s theory of art just as surely as they had already done for Bradley and Cooper. More specifically, it was through his theory of contraries Yeats also became obsessed with doubleness: by 1937 he began to ‘to see things double – doubled in history, world history, personal history’. He describes his feeling of being plunged ‘into the madness of vision, into a sense of the relation between separated things that you cannot explain’.19 Yeats’s mask theory enabled a man to comprise many selves and antiselves and allowed the same confusion between the single voice and the chorus, and the same paradox between identity and difference, seen in Michael Field’s poetic persona. In ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, we can see how

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Yeats’s ‘anti-self ’ functions poetically in a manner sometimes similar to Bradley and Cooper’s double-self, ensuring poetic presence and an audience for the lyric which wards off the threat of singing into the void: I call to the mysterious one who yet Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream And look most like me, being indeed my double, And prove of all imaginable things The most unlike, being my anti-self, [ . . . ].20

When Yeats writes to George Russell in 1898 that ‘You are face to face with the heterogeneous, and the test of one’s harmony is our power to absorb it and make it harmonious’, he might be writing a summary of Michael Field’s handling of paradox.21 Michael Field actually inhabit – in life and text – the paradox and the duality around which Yeats’s aesthetic system is built. It is difficult to believe that he (who selected generously from their work in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse of 1936) took nothing from them aesthetically. As a poet and a dramatist, Yeats was able to absorb from Pater the problem of the interaction between personal and universal history, and, some argue, to ‘achieve a more satisfactory solution than Pound or Eliot’.22 Whether this is true or not, we must certainly recognise that Michael Field was, before Yeats, a part of this lineage; and, moreover, that Bradley and Cooper gave an earlier, and equally elaborately crafted, solution from which Yeats learned. As much in touch with the early twentieth-century dilemma of reconciling personal, solipsistic, diachronic flux with universal, synchronic order and meaning, we must not be fooled by Bradley and Cooper’s apparently Victorian ‘eccentricity’ – and their sex – into placing them apart from this lineage. Wild Honey from Various Thyme is Michael Field’s most clearly ‘protomodernist’ volume of verse, engaged as it is with that opening of the chasm between poet and audience, high culture and mass culture, personal and the impersonal. The personal paradox played out in this volume (and all of those thereafter) between the pagan and the Christian also brings the women’s concerns with temporal cycles into contact with a discourse widely recognised for figuring an interrelation between individual and global history. In this, Michael Field’s first volume of the twentieth century, there is something distinctively ‘modern’, whose place in turn-of-the-century literary history can only be properly recognised by mapping their achievements on to territory made visible in critical work on the better-known Yeats.23 Talking about either the ‘modern’ or modernist element in turn-ofthe-century literature can risk implying that literature of the period

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should be seen as part of a simple aesthetic advancement towards modernism (a critical myth that stubbornly persists). Yet I invoke this comparison between Michael Field and Yeats not to show that the former is valuable insofar as Bradley and Cooper anticipate concerns that became definitive of literary modernism, but in order to recognise the specificity of the fin-de-sie`cle period in its own right, which combines elements more usually thought of as either Victorian or modernist in a manner that produces a rather distinctive aesthetic. A comparison between a poem by Michael Field (of 1889) and one by H.D. (of 1921) might serve to focus this issue more precisely. Both poems are based around the Sapphic fragment that H. T. Wharton translated as ‘Neither honey nor bee for me’.24 The ancient proverb refers to those who don’t want pleasure if it has to come with pain, but Sappho uses it to lament the fact that, sleeping alone, she is not getting either the pain or pleasure she craves. Here is Bradley and Cooper’s poem III from Long Ago: L
s’ ’ i ki 
se kiÆ
Oh, not the honey, nor the bee! Yet who can drain the flowers As I? Less mad, Persephone Spoiled the Sicilian Bowers Than I for scent and splendour rove The rosy oleander grove, Or lost in myrtle nook unveil Thoughts that make Aphrodite pale. Honey nor bee! the tingling quest Must that too be denied? Deep in thy bosom I would rest, O golden blossom wide! O poppy-wreath, O violet-crown, I fling your fiery circlets down; The joys o’er which bees murmur deep Your Sappho’s senses may not steep. Honey! clear, soothing, nectarous, sweet, On which my heart would feed, Give me, O Love, the golden meat, And stay my life’s long greed – The food in which the gods delight That glistens tempting in my sight! Phaon, thy lips withhold from me

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‘Michael Field’ The bliss of honey and of bee.

H.D.’s poem was published in 1921 (in Hymen): Fragment 113 ‘Neither honey nor bee for me.’ – Sappho Not honey, not the plunder of the bee from meadow or sand-flower or mountain bush; from winter-flower or shoot born of the later heat: not honey, not the sweet stain on the lips and teeth: not honey, not the deep plunge of soft belly and the clinging of the gold-edged pollen-dusted feet; not so – though rapture blind my eyes, and hunger crisp dark and inert my mouth, not honey, not the south, not the tall stalk of red twin-lilies, nor light branch of fruit tree caught in flexible light branch; not honey, not the south; ah flower of purple iris, flower of white, or of the iris, withering with the grass – for fleck of the sun’s fire, gathers such heat and power, that shadow-print is light, cast through the petals of the yellow iris flower; not iris – old desire – old passion – old forgetfulness – old pain – not this, nor any flower, but if you turn again, seek strength of arm and throat,

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touch as the god; neglect the lyre-note; knowing that you shall feel, about the frame, no trembling of the string but heat, more passionate of bone and the white shell and fiery tempered steel.25

To begin with the superficial differences, one is struck by the fact that, initially, H.D.’s poem just looks and sounds so much more modern, with its free verse and avoidance of poetic rhetoric. In comparison, the rhythmical iambic feet and end rhymes in the Michael Field poem look very Victorian, as do the rhetorical exclamations. This seems to bear out what Pound says when he writes As to Twentieth century poetry, and the poetry which I expect to see written during the next decade or so, it will, I think, [ . . . ] be harder and saner, it will be what Mr Hewlett calls ‘nearer the bone’. [ . . . ] I mean it will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it. At least for myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither.26

Yet when we look closer, Michael Field’s and H.D.’s poems are remarkably similar. Whilst one would not say Michael Field’s poem was imagist, it seems to contain the seeds for what is developed in this manner by H.D. For example, the following lines from the middle of Michael Field’s poem – ‘O golden blossom wide! / O poppy-wreath, O violetcrown / I fling your fiery circlets down’ – are quite closely echoed by a similar image in H.D.’s third stanza , which lists flowers and ends with an invocation of the sun’s fire cast through the petals of the iris. The entrance of Phaon (named by Michael Field, but only ‘you’ for H.D.) at the end of each poem also traces the same narrative structure.27 When we look beyond superficial stylistic differences, then, we see rather similar poems in terms of narrative, sentiment and images. But on still closer inspection it is apparent that something very significant has changed between 1889 and 1921; and this is not in fact the stripping away of ‘painted adjectives’, but that the modernist poem has, for the most part, stripped out the descriptions of the subject within the world, and just recorded her impressions alone: ‘I’ is notably absent here, and indications of place, context and other interlocutors are few. What we see

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in H.D.’s poem is a worry about the subject’s ability to access, and participate in, an objective world leading to almost complete interiority; the subject becomes just a passive receiver rather than an active participant, recording impressions that are apparently reflected in unmediated form in the text. This complete lack of a sense of the subject is related to the extreme self-consciousness of the solipsist. Michael Field’s poem seems at first not to pose these worries at all: the subject is included within the poem as a straightforward ‘I’ who interacts with the outside world in an unproblematic way, and who assumes a shared experience of that world. Yet, this too is complicated if we look at the framing of the poem. Michael Field’s poem is, remember, written by two women (Bradley and Cooper) writing as a man (Michael Field) writing as a woman (Sappho). Perhaps this trail of multiple personae itself poses the problems of mediating subjectivity more directly than H.D.’s modernist stripping away of everything but raw impressions. In other words, Bradley and Cooper don’t, contrary to initial appearances, suppose unproblematic access to an objective world in their poem. This poem is as much concerned with the difficult relationship between subject and world as is H.D.’s – but in different ways. One might even say that Michael Field’s trail of personae address the issue of a filtering consciousness more head-on, while H.D.’s solipsistic narrator sidesteps the problem, choosing instead to aestheticise it and turn it into a mode poetic perception. This is, in part, surely what Isobel Armstrong is referring to when she states: It is clear that the nature of the experiencing subject, the problems of representation, fiction and language, are just as much the heart of Victorian problems as they are the preoccupations of modernism. The difference is that the Victorians see them as problems, the modernists do not. Where the Victorians strive to give a content to these problems [ . . . ] and to formulate a cultural critique, the moderns celebrate the elimination of content. Victorian problems become abstracted, formalised and aestheticised.28

In this sense Michael Field’s poem poses the problem of subjectivity, while H.D.’s poem simply aims to evade it. These poems can also be used to trace through different responses to history over the turn of the century, through radically different engagements with the fragment – that icon of modernist style (indeed, Pound advocated Sappho as a model for modernism). In essence, Michael Field’s poem attempts to complete the fragment, while H.D.’s leaves the fragment as a fragment and values it in its fragmentariness, its partiality. In other

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words, Michael Field add in context to the fragment, while H.D. refuses to locate it. In fact, this difference between the modernist and Victorian fragment seems to be a way of understanding the authorial personas behind the poems as well as the treatment of the Sapphic text within the poems. While ‘Michael Field’, as a dual persona, was a way of uniting Bradley and Cooper – making a whole out of fragments – ‘H.D.’, as a contraction of ‘Hilda Doolittle’, seemed to fragment what was once whole. As Yopie Prins writes, it was Pound who ‘introduced Hilda Doolittle to the literary world in 1913 as a Sapphic fragment’, when he named her H.D.29 In the poems under discussion the treatment of the fragment also tells us something about the relationship between the subject and history, as well as that between the subject and the world. I want to recognise something within the shift between Victorian and modernist epistemologies through an appeal to a distinction between ‘history’ and ‘memory’. A Victorian understanding of the past comes primarily through an awareness of the subject’s own historicity and the distance of the past temporally and conceptually, while a modernist understanding of the past seems more based instead on the model of memory in which the past becomes knowable only insofar as it is present: ‘history is local’, as Nicholas Andrew Miller has put it in his much more detailed study of this characterisation of modernism.30 There is some merit in understanding the particularity of the fin-de-sie`cle poem (as well as, for example, Oscar Wilde’s prose writing on history) through thinking about how it combines these two approaches. Michael Field’s poem situates the subject within history, but also forges that ‘felt’ connection between the present and the past, by pursuing a literary collaboration with the past – by co-writing with Sappho. This results in the configuration of a strange new dimension in which Sappho is historically contextualised, while also being able to conjoin with Bradley and Cooper in a space which is both present and past. For Michael Field, then, the historical fragment is something to be restored; part of a whole that once existed and can be rediscovered or at least given some kind of presence again within the past and the present. This is a powerful and optimistic view of history and our interaction with it, which owes a lot to the Victorian sense of obligation to give the past a voice. H.D., on the other hand, gives up on knowing the past and celebrates the ‘truer’ epistemology of the fragment: only knowing that of the past which survives into the present. If all experience is fragmentary, then there is nothing to be restored, and the fact that the past only exists in fragments ceases to be problematic. In effect, this epistemology erases the problems of how to deal with history. What we see here is an identification

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‘Michael Field’

of present with past, rather than the problems of its difference; a retreat from facing the difference of the past into a more general scepticism. Modernist collage doesn’t question historical connection; it just arranges all surviving fragments within the same plane of the present. By contrast, it is the striving for knowledge of the relations between things that defines the fin-de-sie`cle aesthetic. Ironically, in many ways H.D.’s poem is more decadent than Michael Field’s in that it continues and intensifies an epistemology of loss and solipsism that gathered momentum over the final decades of the nineteenth century. What seems to be lost in this trajectory is a real sense of the problems of subjectivity and history that the Victorians keenly felt in their dealings with the world. Even though H.D.’s poem is stylistically defined by its concern with the difficulty of interaction between the individual mind and the outside world, and with history, Michael Field’s poem actually seems more interested in exploring this relationship. The intricate web woven by Bradley and Cooper to create a sense of wholeness and meaning across the Michael Field oeuvre is a very fin-de-sie`cle response to the necessary fragmentariness of life: it belongs to that high point at the end of the nineteenth century where the problems of subjectivity were recognised, but there still remained an optimism about the potential for art to make fragments whole again. This role for art in the world changed with the modernist turning away from the challenges of such a position; and the fragment ceased to highlight the empty space around it. This inability to ask certain questions is, I suggest, indicative of the regression that must, in part, characterise the trajectory between the fin de sie`cle and modernism, and which must also enable us to delineate the fin de sie`cle as a period that partakes of the characteristics of the Victorian and the modernist but can be equated with neither. It is this moment – with all its elaborate paradoxes designed both to avow and disavow, designed self-consciously to acknowledge the problems of modernity while simultaneously transcending them – that comes more clearly into focus if we attend to ‘Michael Field’, that turn-of-the-century study in aestheticism. I began with reference to In the Name of Time, which contains a central protagonist who is plagued by time and by his attempts to live in accordance with time – whether with the ever-changing flow, or whether with the eternal moment. While this play might act as a manifesto for the concerns that recur prominently throughout Michael Field’s poetry, a very different vision is offered in A Question of Memory. Here the play is set during the Hungarian Rising of 1848, and follows the fortunes of Ferencz and his regiment. The original ending (in which two men and a woman

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settle into an unconventional me´nage together) was replaced, in the performed version, by a rather more disturbing conclusion. The play culminates in Ferencz being called upon by the Austrian officers to reveal the hiding place of the rebels in order to save his betrothed from execution. He tries to hold out against this threat (hearing his mother shot for his refusal to co-operate), but in the end is driven to distraction by the thought of the suffering of his bride-to-be, and resolves to reveal his secret. Yet in his disturbed state his memory fails him and, even though he wants to tell, he can’t remember. His betrothed is shot as a punishment, and one of his fellow rebels is brought in and given the same treatment. Unlike Ferencz, Lazlo manages to tell the secret in order to save his sweetheart. However, the end of the play sees Ferencz sent away free because he is no use to the officers, while Laszlo is shot in spite of having given them the information they wanted: ‘Take out the traitor and shoot / him. The madman may go’ (129). Ferencz’s madness is a symbolic loss of any sense of the relations of bodies across time and space: he has lost the ability to connect through memory to the time at which he was in the hideout in the hills, and as a result the geographical connection with his comrades as well as the temporal connection is broken. Yet it is this forgetting which saves him. This strange play – the only one to be staged – depicts the opposite madness to that delirium which produced Cooper’s ‘multiform life’. Forgetting is an opposite but mirroring strategy to the combination of the diachronic and synchronic modes (based, as I have suggested, on a strong historical memory, or mnemonic history) that we see in the poetry: both allow one to live simultaneously within and outside of time. Yet A Question of Memory falls flat, and its madness of forgetting fails to inspire. The intricate, ecstatic, paradoxical act of temporal negotiation I have traced in the poetry, on the other hand, enacts a displacement which reconfigures connection across space and time and allows an impossible, yet sustained, physics (or metaphysics) of interrelation. It is this latter option that Bradley and Cooper choose within life as well as within the lyric, constructing through ‘Michael Field’ an autobiography as artfully wrought as their poetry, and one that is structured by the same aesthetic solutions. Only here, though, does the dialectic of the temporal paradox finally find itself forced into resolution in the face of the harsh reality of time. Yet it is rather poignant that, even on her deathbed, Cooper’s last words betray something of the struggle to transcend that so powerfully motivated the work of Michael Field: ‘not just yet, I am not going just yet . . . ’.31

Notes

introduction: ‘something fierce, subtle, strange, singular’ 1 Concise Science Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 2 Holly Laird, ‘Contradictory Legacies: Michael Field and Feminist Restoration’, Victorian Poetry 33 (Spring 1995), 114. 3 Along with Jonathan Freeman, and critics such as Kathy Psomiades and Talia Schaffer, I use this term in the newer sense to denote the aesthetic that characterised the long period from about 1860 to around 1914, and that incorporates decadence as a subset within it, rather than to describe a much more confined group of writers between about 1860 and 1880. 4 See Leverson’s ‘Reminiscences’, in Violet Wyndham, The Sphinx and Her Circle (London: Andre´ Deutsch, 1963), p. 105: ‘margin in every sense was in demand’. 5 Mary Sturgeon, Michael Field (London: George G. Harrap, 1921); Emma Donoghue, We Are Michael Field (Bath: Absolute Press, 1998). 6 Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 47–8. 7 Sturgeon, Michael Field, p. 20. 8 Published volumes by Bradley and Cooper will be referred to throughout this book without notes giving full reference details; publication information can be easily found in the separate bibliography of their major works included at the end of the book, and page numbers will be given parenthetically within my text. 9 The Academy (10 September 1881), 196. 10 Yopie Prins notes that this pair of names also blurs genders and ‘suggests various possible relationships between the two names: a pair of siblings, a parent and child, a married couple’; an ambiguity utterly appropriate for an aunt and niece who were also mother and daughter, sisters, lovers (‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’, in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 55). 11 BOD, MS.Eng.poet.d.74: a partial draft of the play in manuscript form with a title page signed ‘John Cooley’ (1r). 12 Sturgeon, Michael Field, p. 23. 216

Notes to pages 3–8

217

13 For more on the philanthropic ‘Guild’, see Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Later Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 306–9. 14 Letter from John Ruskin to KB, 25 December 1877 (BL, Add.MS.46867, fol. 137r). 15 An array of such references might include the following: Pater’s use of the term ‘pagan’ in opposition to Christianity and the modern world in ‘Winckelmann’ (The Renaissance); Rupert Brooke’s ‘neo-pagan’ circle, characterised by a rejection of Christianity and liberated sexual activity; William Sharp’s The Pagan Review in 1892 (see Terry Meyers, The Sexual Tensions of William Sharp: A Study of the Birth of Fiona MacLeod (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), where Meyers includes a long note on the use of the term ‘pagan’ (pp. 49–52, n. 25)). 16 Ivor C. Treby argues that the name ‘Field’ comes from the earlier pseudonym ‘Arran Leigh’, because ‘Field’ and ‘lea’ have the same meaning (The Michael Field Catalogue (De Blackland Press, 1998), p. 30). 17 I am grateful to Joseph Bristow for persuading me of the appropriateness of this. 18 Browning wrote to ‘Miss Cooper’ on the subject of Callirrhoe¨ in 1884: ‘I have been so thoroughly impressed by indubitable poetic genius; a word I consider while I write, only to repeat it, ‘‘genius’’ ’ (BL, Add.MS.46866, fol. 7r). 19 Letter from Andre´ Raffalovich to ‘Michael Field’; 16 November 1884 (BL, Add.MS.45851, fol. 72r–v). 20 Letter from A. Mary F. Robinson to ‘Michael Field’; 1885 (BOD, MS.Eng. lett.e.32, fols. 96r–97r). 21 MF correspondence: KB to EC (BOD, MS.Eng.lett.c.418, fol. 122r–v). 22 See Vadillo’s analysis of Michael Field’s experience of the suburbs in Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 154–75. 23 Charles Ricketts, Michael Field, ed. Paul Delaney (Edinburgh: The Tragara Press, 1976), p. 4. 24 MF diaries: vol. 6, 1893, fol. 6v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46781). 25 MF diaries: vol. 20, 1906, fol. 14v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46795). 26 Patrick Allitt, Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 127. 27 Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. XIII, The Nineteenth Century, ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916), p. 181. 28 See Ivor C. Treby’s thorough list of these in his Michael Field Catalogue. I am indebted in very many practical ways, throughout this book, to Ivor C. Treby for his detailed work in the Catalogue. 29 For more discussion of Gerin’s project, see James G. Nelson, The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 222, 234–5. 30 MF diaries: vol. 4, 1891 (28 November), fol. 140r, KB’s hand (BL, Add. MS.46779).

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Notes to pages 8–13

31 This review (‘Women and Men: Women Laureates’, Harper’s Bazar (New York, 17 June 1893)) was sent to the women by the author, and they kept it (BOD, MS.Eng.lett.e.33, fols. 119–11; note: the page numbering is wrong in this volume and numbers 110–19 appear twice in succession). 32 Lionel Johnson, ‘Introduction’ to selected poems by Michael Field, The Poets and the Poetry of the Century, ed. Alfred H. Miles (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1898), vol. VIII, p. 395. 33 Johnson, ‘Introduction’, p. 398. 34 Obituary of Edith Emma Cooper, The Athenaeum (20 December 1913), 729. 35 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 20). 36 See also a letter to Sturge Moore from 1911 (MF correspondence: BOD, MS. Eng.Lett.c.432, fol. 76r–v): ‘these vols – The Accuser, & The Tragedy of Pardon – are not ours – we disown them. [ . . . .] They are the work of one dead – one with whom we are not in sympathy’. 37 Works and Days: From the Journal of Michael Field, ed. T. and D. C. Sturge Moore (London: John Murray, 1933), p. 115. 38 Works and Days, ed. Sturge Moore, p. 122. 39 Works and Days, ed. Sturge Moore, p. 138. 40 This comprises: A Shorter Sh
ıraza¯d (De Blackland Press, 1999), Music and Silence (De Blackland Press, 2000) and Uncertain Rain (De Blackland Press, 2002). 41 MF diaries: vol. 5, 1892 (9 June), fol. 105r, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46780). 42 Arthur Symons, ‘Michael Field’, The Forum 69 (1923), 1587. 43 See, particularly, Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds (eds), Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 44 Oxford and New York: Woodstock Books, 1993. 45 Charles Ricketts, Some Letters from Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon to ‘Michael Field’ (1894–1902), ed. J. G. Paul Delaney (Edinburgh: The Tragara Press, 1979); Letters from Charles Ricketts to ‘Michael Field’ (1903–1913), ed J. G. Paul Delaney (Edinburgh: The Tragara Press, 1981). 46 This is how Michael Field is presented in Angela Leighton’s Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992) and Talia Schaffer’s The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 46. 47 ‘After the austere Bristol days, when their gravity might have been at least a thousand years old, they grew steadily younger through the next fifteen years’ (Sturgeon, Michael Field, p. 38). 48 Diana Maltz, British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870–1900: Beauty for the People (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 20–5. 49 See the draft of a speech opposing ‘the state-regulation of vice’ (KB’s hand; BOD, MS.Eng.poet.d.75, fols. 51v–66v). 50 MF diaries: vol. 2, April 1888–December 1889 (19 May 1889), fol. 67r, KB’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46777). See also Yeats’s letter to Katharine Tynan dated

Notes to pages 13–17

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31 May 1887, in which he writes of Bradley’s presence at the Society’s meetings (The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert HartDavis, 1954), pp. 39–40). 51 Pairings between the women writer and the dog include: Emily Dickinson and her Newfoundland, Carlo; Emily Bronte¨ and Keeper; Edith Wharton and her Pekinese, Mitou. Notable dog-related texts include Christina Rossetti’s poem for an anti-vivisection bazaar, ‘Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Dog’, in The Complete Poems, ed. R. W. Crump (London: Penguin, 2001), and Frances Power Cobbe’s prose work, The Confessions of a Lost Dog (London: Griffith & Farran, 1867). 52 See Dinah Birch, ‘ ‘‘That Ghastly Work’’: Ruskin, Animals and Anatomy’ (Worldviews 4 (2000), 131–45), for more on Ruskin’s anti-vivisection sentiments. 53 Rothenstein, ‘Introduction’, to Michael Field, Works and Days, ed. T. and D. C. Sturge Moore (London: John Murray, 1933), p. x. 54 MF diaries: vol. 5, 1892, fol. 99v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46780). 55 Ricketts, Letters to ‘Michael Field’ (1903–1913), p. 23. 56 MF diaries: vol. 7, 1894, fols. 37v–38r, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46782). 57 MF diaries: vol. 4, 1891, fol. 29r, KB’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46779). 58 See Laurel Brake, Print in Transition, 1850–1910 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 154: ‘Impressionism, feminism, naturalism, dandyism, symbolism, and classicism all participate in the politics of Decadence in the 1890s, and in the Yellow Book’. 59 See Karl Beckson and Mark Samuels Lasner, ‘The Yellow Book and Beyond: Selected Letters of Henry Harland to John Lane’, ELT 42 (1999), 408. 60 See Karl Beckson, Henry Harland: His Life and Work (London: The Eighteen Nineties Society, 1978), p. 72 (quoting John M. Richards, The Life of John Oliver Hobbes (London, 1911), p. 86); Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes, p. 172; and Beckson and Lasner, ‘The Yellow Book and Beyond’, 403. 61 Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades (eds), ‘Introduction’, Women and British Aestheticism (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999), p. 16. 62 See Kathy Alexis Psomiades’s comments on gender and aestheticism in Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 181–2. 63 Freedman, Professions of Taste, p. 31. 64 Walter Pater: Three Major Texts (The Renaissance; Appreciations; and Imaginary Portraits), ed. William E. Buckler (New York: New York University Press, 1986), p. 219. This is an essential part of what R. K. R. Thornton labelled the ‘Decadent dilemma’ (The Decadent Dilemma (London: Edward Arnold, 1983)). 65 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Bailey (Mineola, NY: Dover Philosophical Classics, 2004), throughout.

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Notes to pages 21–4 1 the diaries and dramas: life-writing and the temporal patterns of aestheticism

1 In 1907, Cooper refers in the diary to an event a decade ago when ‘Michael found herself at Lyme Regis, kissing the feet of the crucifix, & moved so utterly she wrote a noble sonnet, bleak as a stripped altar’ (MF diaries: vol. January–September 1907, fol. 54r, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46796)). 2 MF diaries: vol. 15, 1901, fol. 1v, KB’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46790). 3 Linda H. Peterson, Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 26–7. It is because of this necessity to struggle with conventional forms that Peterson considers the great Victorian autobiographies to be ‘not only examples of the genre, but critical reflections upon it as well’ (p. 28). 4 The first volume, written by Bradley alone in 1868–9, will not be considered here. 5 BL, Add.MS.46804B. 6 Lynn Z. Bloom, ‘ ‘‘I write for Myself and Strangers’’: Private Diaries as Public Documents’, in Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, ed. Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), pp. 23–37. Bloom writes here, for example, about using narrative techniques that ‘help to develop and contextualize the subject, and thus aid in orienting the work to an external audience’ (p. 29). 7 Robert A. Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 34. 8 Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 231, 3. 9 Philippe Lejeune, ‘The Autobiographical Pact’, in On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine M. Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 4. 10 Lejeune, On Autobiography, p. 5. 11 Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, p. 242. 12 Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, p. 194. 13 Marcus writes of the potential for autobiography to be ‘an exemplary instance of the impossibility of self-presence, the radical split between the self that writes and the self that is written, and the crucial role of language in the constitution of the subject’ (Auto/biographical Discourses, p. 183). 14 Fothergill, Private Chronicles, p. 129. 15 See MF diaries: vol. 8, January–October 1895, fol. 47r (BL, Add.MS.46783), where Bradley describes the women’s meeting with Vernon Lee, and then Cooper gives an alternative account of the same meeting under this heading. 16 ‘Michael Field’ operates in some ways similar to the process of metaphor that James Olney sees as commonly mediating the individual’s experience and communicating it in the autobiography form (Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 3–50). 17 Peterson, Victorian Autobiography, p. 125.

Notes to pages 24–30

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18 MF diaries: vol. 8, January–October 1895, fols. 6r–7v, EC’s hand (BL, Add. MS.46783). 19 A craftsman and artist whom Mary and Bernhard met in 1892 when he came from Paris to Florence (see Mary Berenson: A Self-Portrait from her Letter and Diaries, ed. Barbara Strachey and Jayne Samuels (New York: Norton, 1983), p. 58 and throughout). 20 MF diaries: vol. 8, January–October 1895, fol. 6v, EC’s hand (BL, Add. MS.46783). 21 Fothergill, Private Chronicles, pp. 153, 153–4. 22 For the start of this episode see: MF diaries: vol. 20, 1906, fol. 9v, EC’s hand initially (BL, Add.MS.46795). Further folio references are given parenthetically within the text. 23 Fothergill, Private Chronicles, p. 128. 24 ‘Be pious before each day that dawns. Do not think of what will be in one year, in ten years. Think of today. Leave the theories. All the theories, you see, even those of virtue, are bad, are foolish, do harm. Do not violate life . . . Be pious towards each day, love it, respect it, above all do not let it fade, do not prevent it from blossoming. Love it, even when it is grey and sad, like today.’ 25 MF diaries: vol. 20, 1906, fol. 1v (BL, Add.MS.46795) – ellipsis in the original. 26 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 17). 27 Peterson, Victorian Autobiography, p. 120. 28 See Marcus’s discussion of this (Auto/biographical Discourses, p. 168). 29 Theological modernism (not literary modernism), which challenged the heart of the Catholic Church with change. 30 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 17). 31 Fothergill, particularly, is concerned with repudiating the idea that the diary, ‘unlike almost any other kind of writing, is necessarily unconditioned by a governing idea of a formally completed whole’ (Private Chronicles, p. 44). 32 Fothergill, Private Chronicles, p. 41. 33 See Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 68. 34 Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1897), vol. II, p. 337. 35 See Peter Allan Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History: Carlyle, Arnold, Pater (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 1–12; and also J. S. Mill’s declaration that the idea of comparing one’s own age with eras of the past had become the ‘dominant idea’ of the age (Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History, p. 3). 36 Chris Brooks, ‘Historicism and the Nineteenth Century’, in The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age, ed. Vanessa Brand (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1998). Brooks argues that the title of J. T. Knowles’s The Nineteenth Century, which began publication in 1877, confirms the importance of such nomenclature in

222

Notes to pages 31–6

establishing the age as one which placed itself within history even in its present moment (p. 1). 37 A. Dwight Culler argues that this schema is worked out in Carlyle’s periodical publications of 1831 (The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 61). 38 In his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857, Matthew Arnold argued that we need to understand the past – and particularly those eras that mirror our own most closely – in order to know ourselves (Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 6 vols (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–) vol. I, On the Modern Element in Literature, pp. 18–37, particularly p. 25). 39 Thomas Carlyle, Lectures on the History of Literature (April–July 1838), ed. J. Reay Greene (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1892), throughout. 40 The Works of Thomas Carlyle (London: Chapman and Hall, 1898–99, centenary edition), vol. XXVII, p. 89 (‘On History’). 41 The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. I, pp. 194–5 (Sartor Resartus). 42 The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. V, p. 2 (‘The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology’, from Heroes and Hero-Worship). 43 Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History, p. 53. 44 See Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History, p. 282. 45 Chris R. Vanden Bossche points out the extent to which Carlyle’s ‘emphasis on clothing as woven textile plays on the root of the word text – textere, to weave’ (Carlyle and the Search for Authority (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), p. 43). 46 W. Dilthey, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. H. P. Rickman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 215 (‘The Construction of the Historical World in the Human Studies’, no date). 47 W. Dilthey, Meaning in History: W. Dilthey’s Thoughts on History and Society, ed. H. P. Rickman (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961), p. 100. 48 W. Dilthey, Selected Writings, p. 214. 49 Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, pp. 142–3. 50 Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, p. 244. 51 Dale notes that the function of the various Victorian explanations of historical pattern was to enable the historicist to ‘interpret and to rationalize [ . . . ] the disconcertingly confused spectacle of the ‘‘modern age’’’, but also to study the future by ‘revealing the recurring pattern or necessary direction of human affairs’ (The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History, pp. 5–6). 52 E. D. A. Morshead, Review of Attila, My Attila!, The Academy 25 (January 1896), p. 71. 53 Mary Sturgeon, ‘Michael Field’, Studies of The Contemporary Poets, (London: Harrap, 1920, revised edition), p. 363. 54 See, for example, MF diaries: vol. 6, 1893, fol. 104v (BL, Add.MS.46781); and MF diaries: vol. 2, April 1888–December 1889, fol. 62 (BL, Add.MS.46777). In both instances the play is referred to as ‘Carloman’. 55 Walter Pater, Greek Studies (London: Macmillan, 1895), pp. 263–82.

Notes to pages 36–44

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56 MS.Eng.lett.d.120, fol. 9. 57 See MF diaries: vol. 9, October–December 1895, fols. 3v–4r, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46784). (I am indebted to Ana Parejo Vadillo for bringing this passage to my attention.) 58 See Pater, ‘The Marbles of Aegina’, Greek Studies, pp. 264–5. 59 At the point at which they finished the play, they had lived through their first distinctly centripetal phase, under the influence of Ruskin and conventional Christianity, and were in the middle of the subsequent centrifugal phase, having acquired the pet dog and liberated pagan inclinations. 60 Marius himself speaks at one point of ‘retracing in his intellectual pilgrimage the actual historic order of old philosophy’ (Pater, Marius the Epicurean (London: Macmillan, 1885), vol. I, p. 135). 61 ‘The Marbles of Aegina’, Greek Studies, p. 264. 62 ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ (Appreciations), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, p. 521. 63 MF correspondence: 13 October 1886; KB’s hand (BL Add.MS.45853, fol. 126r).

2 long ago : the male pseudonym, fin-de-sie` cle sexualities and sappho’s historical leap 1 MF correspondence: EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46866, fols. 29v–30r (this letter progresses backwards on to the back of the previous page)). 2 MF correspondence: 23 November 1884; KB’s hand (BL, Add.MS 46866, fols. 16r–17r). 3 Sturgeon, Michael Field, p. 29. 4 Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart, pp. 203, 203–4; Walter Besant, ‘On Literary Collaboration’, The New Review, 6 (1892), 201. 5 See Laird, Women Coauthors (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 85; and, Laird, ‘Contradictory Legacies’, p. 116. 6 Catherine A. Judd tells us that, in the novel, more male writers used female pseudonyms than vice versa; see ‘Male Pseudonyms and Female Authority in Victorian England’, in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 250. 7 Judd, ‘Male Pseudonyms’, p. 254. 8 MF correspondence: 23 November 1884; KB’s hand (BL, Add.MS 46866, fol. 18r–v). 9 MF correspondence: 23 November 1884; KB’s hand (BL, Add.MS 46866, fol. 17r–v). 10 MF correspondence: 27 November 1884; KB’s hand (BL, Add.MS 46866, fol. 22r). 11 MF correspondence: 28 December 1877; John Ruskin to KB (BL, Add.MS 46867, fols. 139r–140v). 12 Judd, ‘Male Pseudonyms’, p. 258.

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Notes to pages 45–8

13 Kathy Alexis Psomiades, ‘Subtly of Herself Contemplative: Women, Poets, and British Aestheticism’, Ph.D. thesis, Yale University, 1990, p. 233. 14 Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Junction Books, 1981). 15 Virginia Blain, ‘ ‘‘Michael Field, the Two-Headed Nightingale’’: Lesbian Text as Palimpsest’, Women’s History Review 5.2 (1996), 252. 16 Blain, ‘ ‘‘The Two-Headed Nightingale’’ ’, 249. See MF correspondence: KB to EC (BOD, MS Eng.lett.c.418, fol. 117r); and EC to KB (MS.Eng.lett.c.419, fol. 97v). 17 Comparisons with the Ladies of Llangollen are pertinent here. Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby eloped together in 1778 and use discourses of married passion in a similar way to Bradley and Cooper. Ruth Vanita asks what more we could expect in their discourse to give evidence of a sexual relationship (Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 113). 18 MF correspondence: KB to EC (BOD, MS Eng.lett.c.418, fol. 117r); EC to KB (BOD, MS.Eng.lett.c.419: fol. 76v); EC to KB (BOD, MS.Eng.lett.c.419, fol. 71v). Given the interest in ancient Persia displayed in Underneath the Bough, the ‘Coo, coo’ing may be a reference to the ringdove which appears in Edward FitzGerald’s second edition of the Ruba´iya´t of Omar Khayya´m (1868): ‘ ‘‘Coo, coo, coo,’’ she cried; and ‘‘Coo, coo, coo’’ ’ (verse 20). 19 MF diaries: vol. 27, 1912 (31 December), fol. 140r, KB’s hand (BL, Add. MS.46802). 20 Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, p. 210. 21 Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 216. 22 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company, 1913, 3rd edition), p. 133. 23 Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion, p. 143. 24 Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion, p. 147. 25 Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion, pp. 134, 133. 26 MF diaries: vol. 8, January–October 1895, fol. 46v and 47v, KB’s hand; EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46783). 27 Havelock Ellis, My Life (London: William Heinemann, 1940), p. 263. 28 Ellis, My Life, pp. 325–6. 29 Martha Vicinus, ‘The Adolescent Boy: Fin de Sie`cle Femme Fatale?’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 (1994), 92. 30 MF diaries: vol. 4, 1891, fol. 99r, EC’s hand, but copying out KB’s prose (BL, Add.MS.46779). 31 MF correspondence: KB to EC (BOD, MS Eng.lett.c.418, fol. 161v). 32 Jerusha Hull McCormack, The Man Who Was Dorian Gray (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), p. 235. This is not a direct quotation from Raffalovich, but rather a paraphrasing of a primary source by McCormack.

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McCormack remarks in parenthesis that Raffalovich’s instincts were wrong about Michael Field being chaste. 33 Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal (1857). There are two poems of this name in the collection, but in the shorter, stanzas 3, 4 and 5 (detailing three different types of perversion) do not appear in any way as a unit that might be extracted, while in the longer version there is a clear narrative event delineated in this section. For this reason my reading is based on the longer version. 34 MF diaries: vol. 21, January–September 1907, fols. 68v, 71v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46796). 35 MF correspondence: KB to EC (BOD, MS Eng.lett.c.418, fol. 90v). 36 MF correspondence: KB to EC (BOD, MS Eng.lett.c.418, fol. 92r). 37 Emma Harris Cooper: Edith’s mother, Katharine’s sister. 38 MF correspondence: KB to EC (BOD, MS Eng.lett.c.418, fol. 92v). 39 See Rick Incorvati’s ‘Introduction’ to Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Women’s Friendships and Lesbian Sexuality 23.2 (2001). Here he cites the 1810 case of Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods, who won a libel suit against a woman who had ruined their school business by alleging that the two school mistresses engaged in sexual acts with each other: ‘Woods and Pirie not only denied the accusations but made the sheer unbelievability of the charge part of their defense’ (177). 40 MF correspondence: EC to KB (BOD, MS.Eng.lett.c.419, fols. 69–71). Letters from Cooper to her mother, written while she is away with Bradley are quite different in tone, showing the dutiful daughter reporting to the family (BOD, MS.Eng.lett.c.419, fol. 162v). 41 See White (ed.), ‘ ‘‘Poets and Lovers Evermore’’: Interpreting Female Love in the Poetry and Journals of Michael Field’, Textual Practice 4.2 (1990); and ‘Flesh and Roses: Michael Field’s Metaphors of Pleasure and Desire’, Women’s Writing 3.1 (1996). 42 White, ‘ ‘‘Poets and Lovers’’ ’, 202. 43 Chris White (ed.), editorial introduction, Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 237. 44 Chris White identified discourses of desire figured around Tiresias, the Virgin Mary and Sappho (in ‘The Tiresian Poet: Michael Field’, in Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader, ed. Angela Leighton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 148–61); Ruth Vanita has examined Sappho and the Virgin Mary as centres for erotic discourse (Sappho and the Virgin Mary); and, most notably, Yopie Prins has worked intensively on the Victorian Sapphic. Victorian Sappho (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), devotes a chapter to Michael Field; ‘A Metaphorical Field: Katherine [sic] Bradley and Edith Cooper’, Victorian Poetry 33.1 (1995), 129–48; see also ‘Sappho Doubled: Michael Field’. Yale Journal of Criticism 8 (1995), 165–86). 45 MF correspondence: 28 October 1894; KB’s hand (BOD, MS.Eng.lett.e.143, fol. 202v). 46 In a postscript to a letter to Bradley (April 1903), Ricketts talks of ‘The fellow’ (Shannon) who ‘sends love’ (Ricketts, Letters to ‘Michael Field’ (1903–1913),

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Notes to pages 51–60

p. 12); in another letter, Ricketts refers to Cooper as Bradley’s ‘fellow’: ‘I trust the ambergris has cured your fellow’ (Letters to ‘Michael Field’ (1903–1913), p. 14). 47 MF diaries: vol. 13, 1899, fol. 86v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46788). 48 MF diaries: vol. 5, 1892, fol. 134r, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46780). 49 MF diaries: vol. 5, 1892, fol. 157v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46780). 50 Prins, Victorian Sappho, p. 77. At this time, ‘A lesbian sub-culture of sorts did exist, but was a pale version of the male’ (Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1977), p. 87). 51 Prins, Victorian Sappho, p. 59. 52 Prins, ‘A Metaphorical Field’, 136–7. 53 Kate Flint, ‘ ‘‘ . . . As A Rule, I Does Not Mean I’’: Personal Identity and the Victorian Woman Poet’, in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 157. 54 Laird, Women Coauthors, p. 82. 55 Dellamora, Masculine Desire, p. 71. 56 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Erotic Symbolism; The Mechanism of Detumescence; The Psychic State in Pregnancy (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company, 1914, 3rd edition; first published 1906), p. 2. Ellis is keen to point out that fetishism, or ‘erotic symbolism’ as he mostly calls it, ‘is in its essence absolutely normal’. It is only in its extreme manifestations that it becomes bizarre (pp. 8–9). 57 Teresa De Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 223. 58 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, pp. 224, 232. 59 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 228. 60 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, pp. 242–3. 61 Elizabeth A. Grosz gives a rather different account of the lesbian fetish, which does not distinguish between the true invert and the lesbian fetishist: for her, female fetishism is possible only in the case of females who believe themselves to be male; see ‘Lesbian Fetishism?’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3.2 (1991), 39–54. 62 As does Grosz. 63 Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary, p. 102ff. 64 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 18). 65 Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Erotic Symbolism, pp. 3–4. 66 Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Erotic Symbolism, p. 45. 67 Grosz, ‘Lesbian Fetishim?’, 42. It is this substitute, the fetish object, that both affirms and denies women’s castration: ‘The fetish is his homage to the missing maternal phallus, his way of both preserving his belief in it and at the same time accepting her castration and, with it, the possibility of his own’ (43). 68 Grosz, ‘Lesbian Fetishim’, 41–3. 69 White, ‘The Tiresian Poet: Michael Field’, p. 161.

Notes to pages 60–71

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70 White, ‘Flesh and Roses’, 50. 71 Prins, ‘Sappho Doubled: Michael Field’, 183. 72 Thain, Michael Field and Poetic Identity (London: The Eighteen Nineties Society, 2000), p. 30. 73 Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes, p. 15. 74 Angela Leighton, in her article ‘ ‘‘Because Men Made the Laws’’: The Fallen Woman and the Woman Poet’, explains how ‘When it comes to women speaking, a whole complicated magic of sin and contamination comes into play’ (Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader, ed. Angela Leighton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)), p. 227. 75 I do this in Chapter 4, where I propose a lesbian reading of the duality of the pseudonym that is not based on any assumptions about the women’s actual sexual practice. 76 John M. Gray, review of Long Ago, The Academy, 8 June 1889, 388–9.

3 sight and song : botticelli and ekphrastic paradox 1 Note that ekphrasis is an entirely different relationship from that between the text and illustration. The illustration of the text relies on the presence of both together while ekphrasis relies on the absence of the painting. 2 G. E. Lessing, Laocoo¨n, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Indianapolis: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1962; first published 1766). 3 See W. J. T Mitchell’s discussion of the gender politics of Lessing’s Laocoo¨n in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 110. 4 Mitchell, Iconology, p. 111. 5 MF correspondence: 1892; KB to John Miller Gray (BL, Add.MS.45854: vol. 4, fol. 109v). 6 Although, as Julia Saville has pointed out, Michael Field often refer to the paintings by names other than the standard ones art historians of the time were using, and these variations do seem significant (‘The Poetic Imaging of Michael Field’, in The Fin-de Sie`cle Poem, ed. Joseph Bristow (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005), p. 187). 7 MF diaries: vol. 3, 1890, fol. 82v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46778). 8 MF diaries: vol. 3, 1890, fol. 74v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46778). 9 Ruth Webb, ‘Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre’, Word and Image 15.1 (1999), 15. 10 Webb, ‘Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern’, 15. 11 See particularly Wolfgang Iser’s ‘Enfoldings in Paterian Discourse: Modes of Translatability’, in Comparative Criticism 17 (Walter Pater and the Culture of the Fin-de-Sie`cle), ed E. S. Shaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 41–60. 12 Ana I. Parejo Vadillo, ‘Sight and Song: Transparent Translations and a Manifesto for the Observer’, Victorian Poetry 38 (2000), 18–19. 13 Pater (The Renaissance), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, p. 153.

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Notes to pages 71–4

14 MF diaries: vol. 3, 1890 (16 August), fol. 103v, EC’s hand (BL, Add. MS.46778). 15 Saville, ‘The Poetic Imaging of Michael Field’; Krista Lysack, ‘Aesthetic Consumption and the Cultural Production of Michael Field’s Sight and Song’, SEL 45.4 (Autumn 2005), 935–60; Vadillo, ‘Sight and Song: Transparent Translations and a Manifesto for the Observer’; Jill Ehnenn, ‘Looking Strategically: Feminist and Queer Aesthetics in Michael Field’s Sight and Song’, Victorian Poetry 43.1 (2005), 109–54; Hilary Fraser, ‘A Visual Field: Michael Field and the Gaze’, Victorian Literature and Culture 34.2 (2006), 553–71. 16 Saville, ‘The Poetic Imaging of Michael Field’, p. 198. 17 See Ehnenn, ‘Looking Strategically: Feminist and Queer Aesthetics in Michael Field’s Sight and Song’, 119–21; Lysack, ‘Aesthetic Consumption and the Cultural Production of Michael Field’s Sight and Song’, 951. 18 Pater (The Renaissance), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, p. 106. 19 John Addington Symonds, Renaissance in Italy (London: Smith, Elder, 1877), vol. III, The Fine Arts, p. 255. 20 Pater (The Renaissance), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, pp. 111–12. 21 Charles Ricketts himself can be seen as emblematic of the change in Botticelli’s fortunes, as he hated the works when he first went to Venice, but later came to promote his work (see J. G. P. Delaney, Charles Ricketts: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 338–9). 22 Anna Brownell Jameson, Legends of the Madonna (London: Longmans, 1852), p. 121. This text went through many editions between 1852 and 1909 and was clearly current throughout the second half of the century. 23 J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle, A New History of Painting in Italy (London: John Murray, 1864), vol. II, pp. 414–30. 24 ‘Notes on Designs of the Old Masters in Florence’ appeared first in the Fortnightly Review (July 1868), but I refer to it as it appeared in Swinburne’s Essays and Studies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), pp. 329, 327. 25 John Addington Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, vol. III, The Fine Arts, p. 250. 26 As early as 1867, according to Wolfgang Lottes (see ‘Appropriating Botticelli: English Approaches 1860–1890’, in Icons, Texts, Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality, ed. Peter Wagner (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), p. 254. 27 Lottes, ‘Appropriating Botticelli: English Approaches 1860–1890’, p. 257. 28 Vadillo, ‘Sight and Song: Transparent Translations and a Manifesto for the Obsever’, 24. 29 Vadillo, ‘Sight and Song: Transparent Translations and a Manifesto for the Obsever’, 25. I have so far referred exclusively to Vadillo’s paper in Victorian Poetry, but in her later book, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism, Vadillo develops her argument with reference to a notion of subjectivity based on the new experience of the world recently acquired through train travel (pp. 154–95). 30 MF correspondence: November 1890; from ‘M. F.’ (KB’s hand) to J. M. Gray (BL, Add.MS.45854: vol. 4, fols. 63r–64v).

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31 There is still remarkably little critical consensus on how to interpret Pater’s ‘Conclusion’. Hilary Fraser, and others, assert Pater’s ‘subjectivism’ in contrast to Arnold’s objectivism (Fraser, Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 193.), while Carolyn Williams and Richard Wollheim see this as a popular misreading of a writer who becomes wrongly identified with the very ‘modern thought’ he sought to expose (Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 12–13; Richard Wollheim, ‘Walter Pater as a Critic of the Arts’, in On Art and the Mind: Essays and Lectures (London: Allen Lane, 1973), pp. 161–4). I am inclined to think that, as Wollheim puts it, those famous passages from the ‘Conclusion’ should be read as if in inverted commas, a trying on of, and struggle with, the ‘modern thought’ Pater was to reject and transcend as the essay moves on. 32 Walter Pater, Uncollected Essays (London: Thomas B. Mosher, 1903), p. 108. 33 Charles Ricketts, The Prado and its Masterpieces (Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co, 1903), p. 82; limited edition on Japanese vellum. 34 Ricketts published The Prado and its Masterpieces in 1903, Titian in 1910 (London: Methuen) and Pages on Art in 1913 (London: Constable and Co). 35 The Prado and its Masterpieces, p. 136. 36 David Peters Corbett, ‘Ekphrasis, History and Value: Charles Ricketts’s Art Criticism’, Word and Image 15.2 (1999), 138. 37 I have to disagree with Julia Saville’s claim that Sight and Song was not influenced by the work of female contemporaries like Vernon Lee (Saville, ‘The Poetic Imaging of Michael Field’, p. 178), but Saville is absolutely right that Bradley and Cooper do not advertise these connections. 38 See Diana Maltz, ‘Engaging ‘‘Delicate Brains’’: From Working-Class Enculturation to Upper-Class Lesbian Liberation in Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther-Thomson’s Psychological Aesthetics’, in Women and British Aestheticism, ed. Schaffer and Psomiades, pp. 211–29. 39 Vernon Lee, The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), pp. 65–6. 40 Lee, The Beautiful, p. 67. 41 Lee, The Beautiful, p. 66. 42 Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 156. 43 Freedman, Professions of Taste, p. 19. 44 See Wolfgang Iser, Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 39–43. 45 H. W. Janson, History of Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995, 5th edition), p. 469. 46 Janson, History of Art, p. 470. 47 Janson, History of Art, p. 470. Of course this embracing of the pagan was not without its problems for Botticelli, who, under the influence of Savonarola, is thought to have burned a number of his ‘pagan’ pictures (p. 471).

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48 See The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1907), vol. XXVII, p. 372 (Fors Clavigera). 49 See Hilary Fraser, Beauty and Belief, p. 188; and Lottes, ‘Appropriating Botticelli: English Approaches 1860–1890’, p. 260. 50 Pater (The Renaissance), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, p. 108. 51 Pater (The Renaissance), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, p. 109. 52 Usually the ekphrastic encounter between poet and painting presupposes that the poet will not confine himself or herself to the specific, still, moment depicted on the canvas, but will ‘discuss the general context, referring both forwards and backwards in time’ (Laurel Brake, Print in Transition, 1850–1910, p. 207). But if the painting already contains this multi-temporal dimension, then the terms of this encounter will be radically changed. 53 See Lessing, Laocoo¨n, p. 91 (Chapter 18). 54 See, for example, Andrew Lang’s ‘A Nativity of Sandro Botticelli’ (The Poetical Works of Andrew Lang, 2 vols, ed. Mrs Lang (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1923), p. 117), and other poems about Botticelli’s Christian scenes by Eva Gore-Booth (Poems (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1929), pp. 470, 472, 573). 55 Ernest Radford, Measured Steps (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1884), p. 41. 56 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ballads and Sonnets (London: Ellis and White, 1881), p. 312. 57 John Hollander, ‘The Poetics of Ekphrasis’, Word and Image 4.1 (January– March 1988), 209–19. 58 Hollander, ‘The Poetics of Ekphrasis’, 214. 59 Hollander, ‘The Poetics of Ekphrasis’, 215. 60 Pater, ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ (Appreciations), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, pp. 520–8. See also Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World, p. 58. 61 Pater (Appreciations), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, p. 525. 62 Pater, ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ (Appreciations), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, p. 528. 63 Pater, ‘Sandro Botticelli’ (The Renaissance), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, p. 110. 64 Pater, ‘Sandro Botticelli’ (The Renaissance), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, p. 106. 65 Pater, ‘Sandro Botticelli’ (The Renaissance), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, p. 106. 66 Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, p. 163.

4 underneath the bough : dual authorship and lyric song 1 The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, vol. I, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 408 (stanzas 7, 8, 10). 2 Yopie Prins argues that here the reader, addressed as a lady, is invited to enter a place where ‘thou’ and ‘I’ can read books together: ‘In this way the poem

Notes to pages 92–6

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reenacts a Sapphic eros that also created the Sapphic imitations in Long Ago. It reinscribes the encounter with Sappho’s Greek text as a lesbian seduction’ (‘A Metaphorical Field’, 144). 3 MF correspondence: 24 July 1889; KB to John Miller Gray (BL, Add. MS.45853, fol. 225v). I am indebted to Joseph Bristow for drawing my attention to this quotation. 4 T. W. H. (T. W. Higginson), ‘Women and Men: Women Laureates’, Harper’s Bazar (New York, Saturday 17 June 1893): see BOD, MS.Eng.lett. e.33, fols. 119–111 (NB: the page numbering is wrong in this volume and nos 110–19 appear twice in succession). 5 Joseph Bristow, ‘Michael Field’s Lyrical Aestheticism: Underneath the Bough’, published in reduced form in Michael Field and Their World, ed. Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson (High Wycombe: The Rivendale Press, 1997), pp. 49–62. A. H. Bullen (ed.), Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1891; this text went through multiple, and various, editions starting in 1887). 6 Bristow, ‘Michael Field’s Lyrical Aestheticism’ (here Bristow also argues that this influence was at odds with the teaching of Robert Browning). 7 Edward Dowden, Shakespere: His Mind and Art (1909); reproduced in Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality, ed. Chris White, p. 194. 8 Berenson, Letter to Michael Field (22 December 1892). The Bernhard Berenson Treasury (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), p. 65. 9 Review of Underneath the Bough, The Athenaeum, 9 September 1893 (3437), 345–6. 10 Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart, p. 210. 11 Pater (The Renaissance), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, p. 107. 12 Pater (The Renaissance), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, p. 108. 13 Ruba´iya´t of Omar Khayya´m, trans. and versified by Edward FitzGerald (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1859). The volume went through many editions, with Edmund J. Sullivan (born 1869) adding illustrations to the 1913 edition (published by Methuen). 14 Yet it is no coincidence for Michael Field that the bread and wine also draw the book of verses into a Eucharistic context that becomes more important to them after the conversion, but which was always present in their pagan work. 15 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I, An Introduction (London: Penguin Books, 1990; first published 1976), p. 58. 16 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I, p. 71. 17 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I, pp. 57–8. 18 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I, p. 62. 19 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I, p. 57. 20 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I, p. 57. 21 In Chapter 2, I noted the similarity between the cooing of their stock dove and that of the ringdove featured in the Ruba´iya´t; similarly, the reference to the filled cup in ‘I am thy charge, thy care!’ (The Wattlefold) can be seen to

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echo the references in the first few stanzas of the Ruba´iya´t (see ‘Come, fill the Cup’, in verse 7). 22 ‘[S]ince I entered the Holy Catholic Church, I have never fallen into fleshly sin’, writes Cooper (MF diaries: vol. 22, September–December 1907, fol. 52v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46797)). 23 David J. Moriarty, ‘‘‘Michael Field’’ (Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley) and Their Male Critics’, in Nineteenth-Century Women Writers of the EnglishSpeaking World, ed. Rhoda B. Nathan (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 133. 24 Divers Women (1880) was written with Mrs C. M. Livingston, and From Different Standpoints (1878) with Faye Huntington (pseudonym of Theodosia M. Foster). 25 For further information, see Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Collaboration (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), p. 175. 26 MF correspondence: 23 November 1884; KB to R. Browning (BL, Add.MS 46866, fol. 16r). 27 MF correspondence: 30 May 1884; EC to R. Browning (BL, Add.MS46866, fols. 9v–10v). 28 MF correspondence: 1886; EC to R. Browning (BL, Add.MS46866, fol. 43v). 29 MF correspondence: 29 May 1886; KB to R. Browning (BL, Add.MS46866, fols. 57v–58v). 30 MF correspondence: 29 May 1886; KB to R. Browning (BL, Add.MS46866, fol. 58v). 31 This letter is quoted by Mary Sturgeon in Michael Field (p. 47). 32 Charles Ricketts, Michael Field, p. 4. 33 Indeed, in his essay ‘On Literary Collaboration’, Walter Besant doesn’t discuss lyric poetry at all because he sees the solitary narrative voice as a defining component of the genre. 34 For further discussion of Baron Corvo’s collaborations, see Koestenbaum, Double Talk, p. 162. 35 T. W. H. (T. W. Higginson), in ‘Women and Men: Women Laureates’, Harper’s Bazar (New York, Saturday 17 June 1893). 36 Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart, p. 232. 37 Koestenbaum, Double Talk, p. 53. 38 Blain, ‘ ‘‘The Two-Headed Nightingale’’ ’, pp. 253, 249. 39 Blain, ‘ ‘‘The Two-Headed Nightingale’’ ’, 253. 40 Prins, ‘Sappho Doubled: Michael Field’, 167. 41 Prins, ‘Sappho Doubled: Michael Field’, 177. 42 Prins, ‘A Metaphorical Field’, 134. 43 See Prins, Victorian Sappho; and Virginia Blain’s review of Victorian Sappho in Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23.2 (2001), 317. 44 Blain, review of Victorian Sappho, 317. 45 Matthew Rowlinson, ‘Lyric’, in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 60.

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46 A. Mary F. Robinson (Darmesteter/Duclaux), The Collected Poems, Lyrical and Narrative (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902), pp. 47–8. 47 May Probyn, A Ballad of the Road, and Other Poems (London: W. Satchell and Co, 1883), pp. 37–40. 48 Dorothy Mermin, ‘The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman Poet’, Critical Inquiry 13 (1986), 67. 49 Mermin, ‘The Damsel’, 65. 50 Robinson, Collected Poems, pp. 19–21. 51 Margaret Reynolds, ‘ ‘‘I lived for art, I lived for love’’: The Woman Poet Sings Sappho’s Last Song’, Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader, ed. Angela Leighton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 302, 304. 52 For further clarification on what a ‘homoerotic mode’ might be, see Paula Bennett, Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), pp. 165–6. 53 Laird, Women Coauthors, p. 25. 54 Laird, Women Coauthors, pp. 14, 6. 55 Laird, Women Coauthors, p. 6. 56 See Luce Irigaray, ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 205–18. 57 Prins, ‘A Metaphorical Field’, 134. 58 Laird, Women Coauthors, p. 6 59 Marilyn R. Farwell, ‘Toward a Definition of the Lesbian Literary Imagination’, Sexual Practice/Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism, ed. Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 73. 60 Farwell also notes that the word ‘lesbian’ does not lose its power merely because it abstracts from lesbian experience: ‘Instead, it functions on the symbolic level analogously to the human being who defines herself sexually as a lesbian: it stands as a disruption of the Western tradition that portrays the female and her imagination as marginal’ (‘Toward a Definition of the Lesbian Literary Imagination’, p. 74). 61 Farwell, ‘Toward a Definition of the Lesbian Literary Imagination’, p. 75. 62 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 60; Helene Deutsch, The Psychology of Women (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1944), p. 339. 63 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 297. 64 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 18). 65 Henry Staten, Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. xi. 66 The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London, Longman: 1969), p. 973 (section 123, lines 9–12). 67 Seamus Perry, ‘Elegy’, in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Cronin, Chapman and Harrison, p. 123. 68 Rowlinson, ‘Lyric’, p. 64. 69 Rowlinson, ‘Lyric’, p. 65.

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70 Although the imagery of this poem resonates strongly with the moral of Irigaray’s two lips (which, although separate, are ultimately joined together in a way which precludes the possibility of any real coming apart, or coming together from afar), the psychoanalytic model is still inappropriate here for the reasons already given. 71 See ‘Absence’ in Wild Honey (p. 146), which begins: ‘Should my beloved be absent from my sight, / All work is left unfinished if begun’. 72 See Edmund Gosse, The Jacobean Poets (London: John Murray, 1894); Arthur Symons, ‘John Donne’ of 1899 (reprinted in Figures of Several Centuries (London: Constable and Company, 1916), pp. 80–108); Alice Meynell’s columns on Metaphysical poets for the Pall Mall Gazette in 1897, reprinted in The Wares of Autolycus (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). See also Tracy Seeley’s excellent analysis in ‘ ‘‘The Fair Light Mystery of Images’’: Alice Meynell’s Metaphysical Turn’, Victorian Literature and Culture 34.2 (2006), 663–84; and Tracy Seeley’s ‘ ‘‘The Sun Shines on a World Re-Arisen to Pleasure’’: The Fin-de-Sie`cle Metaphysical Revival’, Literature Compass 3.2 (2006), 195–217. 73 John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (London: Penguin, 1986; first published 1971), p. 89. 74 MF correspondence: 1 February 1908; Bernhard Berenson to ‘Michael’ (KB) (BL, Add.MS.45855, fol. 215v). 75 Donne, Complete English Poems, pp. 84–5. 76 Freedman, Professions of Taste, p. 36. 77 J. S. Mill, ‘What is Poetry?’ (first published 1833), in The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, ed. Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999), p. 1216. 78 See E. Warwick Slinn, ‘Dramatic Monologue’, in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Cronin, Chapman and Harrison, p. 89. 79 MF correspondence: 1879; KB to EC (BOD, MS.Eng.lett.c.418, fol. 9v). 80 Evidence for the time of composition of this poem can be found as follows, where there is a draft of the poem, dated 28 January 1914: MF diaries: vol. 29, 1914, fol. 8r, KB’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46804A). 81 See ‘Two of Us’, cited in Chapter 2: ‘ ‘‘Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of? / They say unto Him: we are able’’ ’ (MF correspondence: BOD, MS.Eng.lett.c.418, fol. 92r). 82 W. David Shaw, Victorians and Mystery: Crises of Representation (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 341. 83 MF diaries: vol. 28, 1913, fol. 93v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46803). 84 MF diaries: vol. 28, 1913, fol. 100r, KB’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46803). 85 MF diaries: vol. 2, April 1888–December 1889, fol. 106r, EC’s hand, copying out KB’s letter (BL, Add.MS.46777). 86 I am indebted to the careful scholarship of Ivor C. Treby in my citation of these figures (The Michael Field Catalogue, p. 90). 87 Sturgeon, Michael Field, p. 65. 88 Sturgeon, Michael Field, p. 66.

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89 Robert P. Fletcher, ‘ ‘‘I Leave a Page Half-Writ’’: Narrative Discoherence in Michael Field’s Underneath the Bough’, in Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830–1900, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 167. 90 Robert P. Fletcher, ‘ ‘‘I Leave a Page Half-Writ’’ ’, pp. 174–5. 91 Freedman, Professions of Taste, p. 25. 92 MF diaries: vol. 28, 1913, fols. 89v–90r, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46803). 93 I am again indebted to Ivor C. Treby for detailing the evidence for this claim (see The Michael Field Catalogue, pp. 144–212). 94 MF diaries: vol. 14, 1900, fols. 140v–141v (October 1900), EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46789). 95 MF correspondence: BOD, MS.Eng.lett.c.429, fol. 142r. 96 14 May 1913; Ricketts, Letters to ‘Michael Field’ (1903–1913), p. 30. 97 According to John Lemprie`re’s Classical Dictionary (London: 1804).

5 wild honey from various thyme : apian aestheticism and the lyric book collection 1 Such issues have featured prominently in recent criticism on the materiality of the fin-de-sie`cle book. Particularly influential has been work by James G. Nelson on the politics and practicalities of publishing (see The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head and Elkin Mathews: Publisher to Yeats, Joyce, Pound (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989)), and work done on book decoration (for example, Nicholas Frankel’s Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000) and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra’s The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Sie`cle Illustrated Books (Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1995)). 2 Ricketts, Letters to ‘Michael Field’ (1903–1913), pp. 23–4 (26 September 1907). 3 Ricketts, Letters to ‘Michael Field’ (1903–1913), p. 25 (from a letter dated 17 September 1907, quoted by editor in a footnote). 4 See Ricketts, Letters to ‘Michael Field’ (1903–1913), p. 25 (see editor’s explanation in n. 2). 5 Review from The Academy copied into diary. MF diaries: vol. 21, January– September 1907, fol. 224v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46796). 6 Anonymous review of Wild Honey from Various Thyme, by Michael Field, The Academy, 8 February 1908, 437–8. 7 MF diaries: vol. 5, 1892, fol. 140r, KB’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46780). 8 MF diaries: vol. 6, 1893, fol. 104r, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46781). 9 MF diaries: vol. 7, 1894, fols. 9v–10r, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46782). 10 Theological modernism had recently been quashed under the new regime of Pope Pius X (see Allitt, Catholic Converts, p. 9). 11 See their wish to be able to write a ‘modern’ play; MF diaries: vol. 6, 1893, fol. 104v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46781). 12 MF diaries: vol. 5, 1892, fol. 123v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46780). 13 MF diaries: vol. 15, 1901, fol. 5r, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46790).

236

Notes to pages 135–42

MF diaries: vol. 6, 1893, fol. 24r, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46781). MF diaries: vol. 6, 1893, fol. 24r, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46781). MF diaries: vol. 23, 1908, fol. 3. EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46798). Earl Miner, ‘Some Issues for Study of Integrated Collections’, in Poems in Their Place, ed. Neil Fraistat (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), p. 29. 18 Neil Fraistat, ‘Introduction’, Poems in Their Place, ed. Fraistat, p. 11. 19 Review from The Academy copied into diary (MF diaries: vol. 21, January– September 1907, fol. 224v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46796)). 20 Bradley wrote this poem and describes it as ‘some sort of a real dream’ (MF correspondence: BOD, MS.Eng.lett.c.429, fol. 142r). 21 George Bornstein, ‘The Arrangement of Browning’s Dramatic Lyrics (1842)’, in Poems in Their Place, ed. Fraistat, p. 273. 22 Fraistat, ‘Introduction’, in Poems in Their Place, p. 10. 23 MF diaries: vol. 13, 1899, fol. 63r, KB’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46788). 24 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 17). 25 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 17). 26 See R. K. R. Thornton, ‘ ‘‘Decadence’’ in Later Nineteenth-Century England’, in Decadence and the 1890s, ed. Ian Fletcher (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), p. 18. 27 See Mark 1: 1–8; and Matthew 3: 1–4. 28 This literary gesture echoes Carlyle’s identification with St John the Baptist (both through Teufelsdrockh in Sartor Resartus, and elsewhere), confirming the close affinity explored in Chapter 1. 29 See Deuteronomy 32: 12–14. 30 Revelations 10: 9–10. 31 Ezekiel 3: 3. 32 Indeed, even the chow dog’s death seems to become subsumed into this Christian bee-narrative: just as the carcass of the lion becomes the nesting place for a swarm of bees and a receptacle for sweet honey in Judges 14, so honey (or, more precisely, this ‘Honey-book’) comes, metaphorically, out of the dead body of the women’s dog - their lion, as they sometimes called him. 33 Olive Schreiner’s ‘A Dream of Wild Bees’ (first published in 1888) constitutes a more contemporaneous link between the ‘wild bee’ and the visionary writer (Dreams, ed. Elisabeth Jay (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2003), pp. 22–4). 34 Swinburne, Selected Poems, ed. L. M. Findlay (Manchester: Fyfield Books, 1982), p. 159. 35 MF diaries: vol. 23, 1908, fol. 1v, letter copied into diary by EC (BL, Add. MS.46798). 36 MF diaries: vol. 23, 1908, fol. 31v (4 February), EC’s hand (BL, Add. MS.46798). 37 Jonathan disobeys both his king and God in tasting the honey from the end of his staff, yet it does him no harm (his ‘eyes were enlightened’). When Jonathan is singled out by God for his misdemeanour, and confesses he ‘did

14 15 16 17

Notes to pages 143–52

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but taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in mine hand, and, lo, I must die’, he is saved by the people who have seen him fight for Israel (1 Samuel 14). 38 Ian Fletcher (ed.), Poems of John Gray (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1988), p. 14. 39 John Gray wrote to Bradley and Cooper in 1908, in relation to George Darley’s 1822 poem, ‘The Bee’, that such poetry ‘stirs an old craving for the impossible in poetry – something to be got from words & images quite exterior to words & thought’ (3 August 1908): John Gray to Michael Field (Berg collection). 40 Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 316. 41 Tennyson, ‘To the Queen’ (published 1873), line 56, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Ricks, p. 1756. 42 Paul Delaney, ‘Book Design: A Nineteenth-Century Revival’, The Connoisseur, August 1978, throughout. See also Kooistra, The Artist as Critic, p. 100. 43 Fair Rosamund, The World at Auction, The Race of Leaves and Julia Domna were all published by the Vale Press, printed by Ballantyne Press, by the Hacon and Ricketts partnership (for further information on the Vale and Ballantyne arrangement, see J. G. P. Delaney, Charles Ricketts: A Biography, p. 95). 44 Sight and Song, Stephania and A Question of Memory. 45 For a description of the book, see Nelson, The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head, p. 87. 46 For example, the play Attila, My Attila! was published by Mathews in 1896. 47 MF diaries: vol. 11, 1897, fols. 21v–22r, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46786). 48 T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 339. 49 Schaffer and Psomiades, ‘Introduction’, Women and British Aestheticism, p. 5. See also Freedman, Professions of Taste; Regenia Gagnier’s Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986); and Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes. 50 Ana Isabel Parejo Vadillo, ‘Women Poets and the Aesthetics of Space and Transport at the Fin de Siecle’, Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2000, p. 202. 51 Lee Erickson writes usefully on this issue in ‘The Market’, A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Cronin, Chapman and Harrison, pp. 345–60. 52 See Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books, pp. 109–30. 53 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 17). 54 Psomiades, Beauty’s Body, p. 3. 55 Psomiades, Beauty’s Body, pp. 201–3. 56 Tennyson, ‘To the Queen’ (published 1873), line 56. The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Ricks, p. 1756. 57 Laurence Hope (pseudonym of Violet Nicholson), The Garden of Kama (1901), in Complete Love Lyrics (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1929), p. 307. 58 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. Phillip Harth (London: Penguin, 1970; first published 1714).

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Notes to pages 152–6

59 For further discussion of bees in political discourse, see David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), Chapter 10, ‘On Architects, Bees, and ‘‘Species Being’’ ’. 60 For a brief history of the nineteenth-century use of the hive as a political image – as well as Cruikshank’s own changing configuration of the image – see Robert L. Patten, George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art, vol. II, 1835– 1878 (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 1996), pp. 441–6. 61 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), p. 629 (all references cited here come within the entries ‘Bee’ and ‘Bee-keeping’). 62 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, p. 635. 63 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, p. 635. 64 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, p. 625. 65 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, p. 635. 66 Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, trans. Alfred Sutro (London: George Allen, 1901). 67 Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, p. 41. 68 Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, p. 40. 69 Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, pp. 338–9, 261–2. 70 At the start of the 1901 journal, Cooper discusses the connections between their British circle and the European aesthetes and Decadents. Here it is noted of Verlaine’s visit to Chelsea to see Ricketts and Shannon that the artists found him ‘dull’ and frustratingly unforthcoming in response to their questions about Maeterlinck (MF diaries: vol. 15, 1901, fol. 7v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46790)). His name appears not infrequently elsewhere in the journal with reference to matters aesthetic (for example, MF diaries: vol. 13, 1899, fol. 83r (BL, Add.MS.46788)). 71 Letter from Bernhard Berenson to ‘Michael’ (KB), May 1892 (BOD, MS. Eng.lett.e.33, fol. 116r (NB the folio numbering in this collection mistakenly contains numbers 110–19 twice over)). 72 Letter from Havelock Ellis to ‘Miss Bradley’, undated (BOD, MS.Eng.lett. e.33, fols. 69r–v, 70r). 73 Ge´rard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 74 Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, ‘Poetry and Illustration’, A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Cronin, Chapman and Harrison, p. 409. 75 Charles Ricketts, ‘The Unwritten Book’, The Dial 2 (1892), 25–8. 76 Ricketts, A Bibliography of the Books Issued by Hacon and Ricketts (London: Vale Press, 1904), p. vii. 77 Susan Brown makes this comparison in her essay ‘The Victorian Poetess’, The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 198. 78 Psomiades, Beauty’s Body, p. 109. 79 Charles Ricketts to ‘My Dear Poet’ (KB), September/October 1907 (BL, Add.MS.58089, fol. 71r).

Notes to pages 157–66

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80 MF diaries: vol. 22, September–December 1907, fol. 14v (19 October), EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46797). 81 Letter from John Gray to ‘Michael’ (KB), 14 January 1908: transcribed into MF diaries: vol. 23, 1908, fol. 6r, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46798). I located the letter itself in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg manuscript collection, in the New York Public Library, but as the archive gives no folio numbers, it is probably more useful to point readers to the transcription in the diaries. 82 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 18). 83 See Moriarty, ‘ ‘‘Michael Field’’ (Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley) and Their Male Critics’, p. 133. 84 Letter from John Gray to ‘Michael’ (KB), 14 January 1908: transcribed into MF diaries: vol. 23, 1908, fol. 6r, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46798). 85 MF correspondence: Bernhard Berenson to ‘Michael’ (KB), 1 February 1908 (BL, Add.MS 45855 fol. 215). 86 Mary Berenson: A Self-Portrait, p. 64 (Berenson to Hannah Whitall Smith, 15 May 1895). 87 Ada Leverson, ‘Reminiscences’, p. 105. 88 Psomiades, Beauty’s Body, p. 90. 89 See Ricketts, Letters to ‘Michael Field’ (1903–1913), p. 25. 90 See the quotation reproduced at the start of this chapter from a letter in which Ricketts describes his difficulty in drawing bees (Letters to ‘Michael Field’ (1903–1913), p. 23). 91 See, for example, ‘October’ (Wild Honey, p. 111), and ‘Down the forest-path I fled’ (Underneath the Bough, p. 11). 92 MF diaries: vol. 14, 1900, fol. 179v, KB’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46789). 93 Lucas Malet, The History of Sir Richard Calmady, ed. Talia Schaffer (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2003), p. 321. 94 Talia Schaffer, ‘Connoisseurship and Concealment in Sir Richard Calmady: Lucas Malet’s Strategic Aestheticism’, Women and British Aestheticism, ed. Schaffer and Psomiades, p. 55. 95 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, p. 628. 96 Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, pp. 283–93, 35. 97 Prins, ‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’, throughout. 98 A. M. F. Robinson, Review of Callirrhoe¨ and Fair Rosamund, The Academy (7 June 1884), 395–6. 99 MF diaries: vol. 7, 1894, fol. 36v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46782). 100 MF diaries: vol. 7, 1894, fol. 37r, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46782). 101 Patricia Yaeger, Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women’s Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 102 The richness of the bee image also enabled it simultaneously to take part in evolutionary discourses that are outside the scope of the ‘Apian Aestheticism’ I trace here. These have been explored in a radical re-reading of literature of the period by Josephine McDonagh in Child Murder and British Culture, 1720–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

240

Notes to pages 168–71

6 the catholic poetry: the spiritual and historical ‘turn’ of the century 1 Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart, p. 223. 2 This chapter was written before I had obtained Hilary Fraser’s paper ‘The Religious Poetry of Michael Field’, which also explores the pagan/Christian dynamic. This chapter is not, therefore, directly indebted to Fraser’s excellent piece, although I hope I might be right in saying there are similarities between the two (Athena’s Shuttle: Myth, Religion, Ideology, from Romanticism to Modernism, ed. Franco Marucci and Emma Sdegno (Milan: Cisalpino, 2001), pp. 127–42). 3 Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, p. 10. 4 See Frederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 125–56. 5 Ruth Vanita explores these issues in Chapter 1 of Sappho and the Virgin Mary. See also E. R. Norman, ‘Introduction’ to Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England, ed. E. R. Norman (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968), and Walter L. Arnstein, Protestant Versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr Newdegate and the Nuns (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982). 6 Hanson’s groundbreaking study follows on from works such as John Maynard’s Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); although Maynard provides the reader with compelling examples of the link between religious and sexual discourses in Victorian literature, they almost always occur within marriage. 7 Maureen F. Moran, ‘‘‘Lovely Manly Mould’’: Hopkins and the Christian Body’, Journal of Victorian Culture 6 (2001), 72. The phrase ‘cold limbo’ is a quotation from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ father, and is referenced by Moran to the Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins Including his Correspondence with Coventry Patmore, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1970, revised edition; first published 1956), p. 435. 8 When Bradley and Cooper wrote that as ‘Poets and lovers’ they were ‘Against the world’, they might as well have been writing of their later Catholic identity (‘It was deep April’, Underneath The Bough, p. 79). 9 See Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture, pp. 157–89. 10 Jerusha Hull McCormack, John Gray: Poet, Dandy, and Priest (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1991), p. 225. 11 See Ruth Z. Temple’s ‘The Other Choice: The Worlds of John Gray, Poet and Priest’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 84 (1981), 40. 12 For further analysis of this relationship, see Ruth Z. Temple, ‘The Other Choice’. 13 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 17). 14 McCormack, John Gray, p. 209. 15 See, for example, Gray’s letter to Bradley of 24 November 1908 (Berg collection), in which the first half is devoted to matters theological, while,

Notes to pages 171–8

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following a firm black line drawn across the page, the second half reminisces about the circle of Decadent writers around Arthur Symons. 16 McCormack, John Gray, p. 210. 17 John Gray to KB: 26 January 1907 (Berg collection). 18 This relationship has previously been discussed very little, and only by writers whose primary interest was in John Gray; see McCormack’s John Gray, and Ruth Z. Temple’s ‘The Other Choice’. 19 Thanks are due to R. K. R. Thornton (the owner of this book) for sharing this discovery with me. 20 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 18). 21 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 18). 22 MF diaries: vol. 20, 1906, fol. 232r (29 December), EC’s hand (BL, Add. MS.46795). 23 Bradley also tells John Gray that a poem or two of hers has entered Poems of Adoration (MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 17)). 24 On 6 May 1912, Edith records that ‘The little black leather strap, that is to bind our Catholic books ‘‘Adoration’’ & ‘‘Mystic Trees’’ together, arrives done rightly’ (MF diaries: vol. 28, 1913, fol. 39r, EC’s hand (BL, Add. MS.46803)). 25 Cooper writes in the diary: ‘I fancy she distrusts me & thinks I should alter lines or words’. Bradley writes: ‘I have not been able to touch ‘‘Mystic Trees’’. But she has – in the night-watches’ (MF diaries: vol. 28, 1913, fols. 29v, 30v, KB’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46803)). 26 Blain, ‘ ‘‘The Two-Headed Nightingale’’ ’, 251. 27 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 17). 28 Pater, Three Major Texts, p. 219. 29 In Bradley’s Mystic Trees, we also see poems that combine aestheticist discourse with the eroticisation of Christ’s wounds. In ‘The Captain Jewel’, Bradley turns the wounds into sensuous images of mouths, stars, jewels and fountains: ‘We love Thy ruddy Wounds, / We love them pout by pout’ (p. 27). 30 White, ‘ ‘‘Poets and Lovers’’ ’, 208–9. 31 See Martha Vicinus’s comments on Mary Benson, in ‘ ‘‘The Gift of Love’’: Nineteenth-Century Religion and Lesbian Passion’ (Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23.2 (2001), 241–64), on how ‘Victorians concealed a sexual crisis in the more acceptable terms of a spiritual crisis, but the two were often inextricably mixed’ (242–63, 246). 32 Allitt, Catholic Converts, p. 129. 33 Dellamora, Masculine Desire, p. 17. 34 Dellamora, Masculine Desire, pp. 47, 50. 35 Maureen Moran, for example, has considered how Hopkins appropriated aspects of muscular Christianity and used them to formulate his own innovative interpretation of a bodily Catholicism (‘ ‘‘Lovely Manly Mould’’ ’, 65, 72). 36 Dellamora, Masculine Desire, p. 212.

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Notes to pages 179–87

37 See the many examples given by Marina Warner throughout Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976). 38 Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary, pp. 133, 134, 133. Vanita also notes the blending of Sapphic and Marian imagery in ‘She is One’ (p. 133). 39 Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture, p. 207. 40 Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary, p. 4. 41 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 17). 42 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, vol. III, ed. Wells and Taylor, Act I, Scene v, lines 102–3. 43 Judith Roof, A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 62. 44 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 296. 45 Virginia Blain, ‘Sexual Politics of the (Victorian) Closet’, in Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830–1900, ed. I. Armstrong and V. Blain (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 137. 46 A manuscript copy of ‘the Iris Was Yellow’ is held in the Huntington Library, dated c. 1890 (reference CB 36). With it is a letter from Bradley to Frances Power Cobbe (also dated c. 1890), which contains this reference to Cooper’s fairy ancestry (reference CB 35). 47 Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, p. 323; translation of Marc-Andre´ Raffalovich, Uranisme et Unisexualite´ (Paris: Masson, 1896), p. 30. 48 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 296. 49 See Julie Melnyk, ‘ ‘‘Mighty Victims’’: Women Writers and the Feminization of Christ’, Victorian Literature and Culture 31.1 (2003), 153. 50 Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, p. 314. 51 John Gray, Spiritual Poems (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1994; facsimile reprint by R. K. R. Thornton and Ian Small, first published 1896), pp. 40–1. 52 John Gray, Spiritual Poems, pp. 23–4. 53 MF diaries: vol. 21, January–September 1907, fol. 4v, EC’s hand (BL, Add. MS.46796). 54 See her record of conversations she has had with Vincent McNabb throughout MF diaries: vol. 23, 1908 (BL, Add.MS.46798). 55 Ruth Vanita’s work provides a brief, but notable exception; see Sappho and the Virgin Mary, p. 120. 56 Dellamora has examined the action of the Trinity in Hopkins’ poetry, arguing that the Holy Ghost ‘guarantees both human regeneration and the continual renewal of nature’ (Masculine Desire, p. 53). 57 The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Norman H. Mackenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 94 (first stanza only). 58 MF diaries: vol. 20, 1906, fols. 230v–231r (29 December), EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46795). 59 MF diaries: vol. 20, 1906, fol. 231r, KB’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46795). 60 Ricketts, Letters to ‘Michael Field’ (1903–1913), p. 19. 61 Marjorie Garber, Dog Love (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 245.

Notes to pages 188–94

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62 Katharine Pionke, ‘Michael Field: Got God?’, MA thesis, Truman State University, 2003, p. 42. 63 MF diaries: vol. 12, 1898, fol. 12v, KB’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46787). 64 Edmund Hill, The Mystery of the Trinity (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1985), p. 79. 65 St Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. John E. Rotelle (New York: New City Press, 1991), Book 8, Chapter 5, section 14 (p. 255). 66 Hill, The Mystery of the Trinity, pp. 93, 109. 67 St Augustine. The Trinity, Book 5, Chapter 3, section 12 (p. 197). 68 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 17). 69 ‘In a wonderful way therefore these three are inseparable from each other, and yet each one of them is substance, and all together they are one substance or being, while they are also posited with reference to one another’ (St Augustine, The Trinity, Book 9, Chapter 1, section 8 (p. 275)). 70 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (London: Staples Press, 1965 (translated from the 12th German edition)), p. 409. 71 Havelock Ellis, ‘The History of Marriage’, Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies (essays and fragments left over from the main volumes): Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 2 vols (New York: Random House, 1936; first published 1928), vol. II, part 2, p. 506. 72 Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Selection in Man (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company, 1914, 3rd edition; first published 1897), pp. 205–6. 73 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, pp. 410–11. 74 Sarah Annes Brown, Devoted Sisters (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 135–54. 75 White, ‘ ‘‘Poets and Lovers’’ ’, 202. 76 St John’s version of the Trinity was one based, again, on Augustine (and Aquinas’s fine-tuning of Augustine’s thinking), albeit mediated through Denys the Carthusian, whom St John studied, and who held immense influence in Spain (Robert Sencourt, Carmelite and Poet: St John of the Cross (London: Hollis and Carter, 1943), p. 36). 77 In Carmelite and Poet, Sencourt writes: ‘The crude Freudian would say that this passion for the unseen lover was but an ebullition or at best a sublimation of the carnal in his nature [ . . . .] But the Freudian explanation is soon refuted by the technical treatises: they make it perfectly clear how the flesh of the mystic was subdued to the spirit: his impulses of love were both ordered and exalted’ (p. 140). 78 John Gray to ‘Michael Field’, 24 November 1908 (Berg collection). This letter is also quoted in McCormack, John Gray, p. 169. 79 Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, p. 325. 80 John Gray to ‘Michael Field’, 20 January 1908 (Berg collection). 81 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 17). 82 St John’s commentary on The Living Flame of Love, given within Sencourt, Carmelite and Poet, p. 165. 83 Robert Sencourt, Carmelite and Poet, p. 168.

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Notes to pages 194–202

84 Stanzas 1 and 2 of The Living Flame of Love, from the translation in Sencourt, Carmelite and Poet, p. 165. 85 Sencourt, Carmelite and Poet, p. 167. 86 From the translation in Sencourt, Carmelite and Poet, p. 171. 87 Works and Days, ed. T. and D. C. Sturge Moore (London: John Murray, 1933), p. 271. 88 Pionke, ‘Michael Field: Got God?’, pp. 32–3. 89 Pionke, ‘Michael Field: Got God?’ p. 36, and conclusion. 90 Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on ‘‘Camp’’ ’, in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, ed. Fabio Cleto (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999; first published 1964), pp. 56, 58 (n. 10 and 18). 91 In her penultimate note (n. 57), Sontag observes that ‘Camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles. The absence of this love is the reason why such kitsch items as Peyton Place (the book) and the Tishman Building aren’t Camp’ (‘Notes on ‘‘Camp’’’, p. 65). 92 Dennis Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody: 1840–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 100. Denisoff also links the emergence of Camp with a point in history where the idea of the homosexual being, as opposed to homosexual acts, emerged (p. 98). 93 Isherwood distinguishes ‘high Camp’ by its ‘underlying seriousness. You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously’ (Christopher Isherwood, The World in the Evening (London: Methuen, 1954), p. 125). 94 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 17). 95 McCormack, John Gray, p. 219. 96 MF correspondence: KB to John Gray (NLS, Dep. 372, no. 17). 97 MF diaries: vol. 20, 1906, fol. 174r, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46795). 98 MF diaries: vol. 20, 1906, fol. 32v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46795). 99 Hilary Fraser believes ‘Michael Field is never more Victorian’ than in this volume, with its ‘preposterous sentimentalism’ (‘The Religious Poetry of Michael Field’, p. 138). Fraser ends her piece with a quotation from the diaries where the women declare allegiance to none other than Queen Victoria (p. 138), yet other excerpts show that, as early as 1892, Bradley and Cooper were writing of leaving the Victorian age behind them and declaring allegiance to ‘the modern’. 100 Freedman, Professions of Taste, pp. 25, 77.

conclusion: modernism and the fin de sie` cle 1 MF diaries: vol. 21, January–September 1907, back lining page (BL, Add. MS.46796). 2 Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture, p . 220. 3 MF diaries: vol. 4, 1891, fol. 94v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46779). 4 ‘Introduction’, Poems by William Cowper (Glasgow and London: Blackie and Sons, 1904), p . iii.

Notes to pages 203–11

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5 See R. K. R. Thornton, ‘ ‘‘Decadence’’ in Later Nineteenth-Century England’, p . 26. 6 Pater, Marius the Epicurean, vol. I, p . 155. 7 Freedman, Professions of Taste, p . 19. 8 Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History, p . 12. 9 Ezra Pound, ‘Lionel Johnson’, preface to Poetical Works of Lionel Johnson (Elkin Mathews: London, 1915), in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968; first published 1954), pp . 361, 363. 10 Pound, quoting Johnson, Literary Essays, p . 366. 11 Perhaps this is, in part, due to the influence of critical narratives by Elaine Showalter, Gilbert and Gubar, and others who depicted an antagonistic relationship between turn of the century women writers and modernism. 12 MF diaries: vol. 17, 1903, fol. 92r–v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46792). See also Yeats’s letter to Michael Field dated ‘July 27’ (1903?) (The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), pp . 407–8). 13 MF diaries: vol. 16, 1902, fol. 85r, 85r–v, EC’s hand (BL, Add.MS.46791). 14 Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (London: Faber and Faber, 1961; first published 1949), p . 2. 15 Edward Engelberg, The Vast Design: Patterns in W. B. Yeats’s Aesthetic (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1974; first published 1964), p . xxx. 16 See Engelberg, The Vast Design, p . 4. 17 See Joseph Ronsley, Yeats’s Autobiography: Life as Symbolic Pattern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 57. 18 W. B. Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1937, 2nd edition; first published privately 1925), throughout. 19 Letter to Dorothy Wellesley, 4 May 1937. The Letters of W. B. Yeats, p . 887. 20 W. B. Yeats, Selected Poetry, ed. Timothy Webb (London: Penguin, 1991) pp. 107–8 (from The Wild Swans at Coole, 1917). 21 The Letters of W. B. Yeats, p . 294. 22 Richard Greaves, Transition, Reception and Modernism in W. B. Yeats (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 19. 23 Indeed, it is perhaps no coincidence that bees also become important in Yeats’s poetry. See Richard Rankin Russell, ‘W.B. Yeats and Eavan Boland: Postcolonial Poets’, in W. B. Yeats and Postcolonialism, ed. Deborah Fleming (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2001), p . 108 n. 24 H. T. Wharton, Sappho (London: John Lane, 1895), fragment 113 (p. 146). 25 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Selected Poems, ed. Louis L. Martz (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988), pp . 46–7. 26 Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, p . 12 (‘A Retrospect’). 27 Laity writes convincingly of the influence on H.D. of male writers such of the fin de sie`cle, but Michael Field needs to feature in this narrative too (H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Sie`cle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p . 60).

246

Notes to pages 212–15

28 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), p . 7. 29 Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp . 4–5. 30 Nicholas Andrew Miller, Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 9. 31 Letter from Bradley to Charles Ricketts giving an account of Cooper’s death (on 13 December 1913): BOD, MS.Eng.lett.c.432, fol. 187r.

Bibliography of material by Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper

This is a chronological list of sources drawn on within this book. For a complete list of works, published and unpublished, see Ivor C. Treby’s Michael Field Catalogue (De Blackland Press, 1998) in which the major UK archival holdings of Michael Field manuscripts are described. the poetry The New Minnesinger (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1875), by Arran Leigh (KB alone) Bellerophoˆn, Poems (London: C. Kegan Paul and Co, 1881), by Arran and Isla Leigh (KB and EC) Long Ago (London: George Bell and Sons, 1889), by Michael Field Sight and Song (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1892), by Michael Field (also republished in facsimile copy by Woodstock Books in 1993, edited by R. K. R. Thornton and Ian Small) Underneath the Bough (London: George Bell and Sons, 1893), by Michael Field (also republished in facsimile copy by Woodstock Books in 1993, edited by R. K. R. Thornton and Ian Small) Underneath the Bough, revised and decreased edition (London: George Bell & Sons, 1893), by Michael Field Long Ago (Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1897), by Michael Field Underneath the Bough (Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1898), by Michael Field Wild Honey from Various Thyme (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), by Michael Field Poems of Adoration (London: Sands and Co, 1912), by Michael Field Mystic Trees (London: Everleigh Nash, 1913), by Michael Field Whym Chow (London: Eragny Press, 1914), by Michael Field Dedicated (London: George Bell and Sons, 1914), by Michael Field A Selection from the Poems of Michael Field (London: The Poetry Bookshop, 1923), ed. T. Sturge Moore

247

248

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The Wattlefold (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1930), unpublished later poetry of Michael Field, collected by Emily C. Fortey, with a preface by Vincent McNabb

There are unpublished poems to be found in draft form in the diaries, many of which have recently been published in Ivor C. Treby’s threevolume collection of Michael Field verse: In Leash to the Stranger: A Shorter Shıraza¯d (De Blackland Press, 1999) Music and Silence (De Blackland Press, 2000) Uncertain Rain (De Blackland Press, 2002).

the drama Bellerophoˆn, Poems (London: C. Kegan Paul and Co, 1881), by Arran and Isla Leigh (KB and EC) Callirrhoe¨ and Fair Rosamund (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884), by Michael Field The Father’s Tragedy, William Rufus, Loyalty or Love (London: George Bell and Sons, 1885), by Michael Field Brutus Ultor (London: George Bell and Sons, 1886), by Michael Field Canute the Great, The Cup of Water (London: George Bell and Sons, 1887), by Michael Field The Tragic Mary (London: George Bell and Sons, 1890), by Michael Field Stephania: A Trialogue (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1892), by Michael Field A Question of Memory (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1893), by Michael Field Attila, My Attila! (London: Elkin Mathews, 1896), by Michael Field Fair Rosamund (London: Hacon & Ricketts, 1897), by Michael Field The World at Auction (London: Hacon & Ricketts, 1898), by Michael Field Anna Ruina (London: David Nutt, 1899), by Michael Field Noontide Branches (Oxford: Henry Daniel, 1899), by Michael Field The Race of Leaves (London: Hacon & Ricketts, 1901), by Michael Field Julia Domna (London: Hacon & Ricketts, 1903), by Michael Field Borgia (London: A. H. Bullen, 1905), published anonymously Queen Mariamne (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1908), by the author of Borgia The Tragedy of Pardon, and Dian: A Fantasy (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1911), by the author of Borgia The Accuser, Tristan De Le´onois, A Messiah (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1911), by the author of Borgia Deirdre, A Question of Memory, Ras Byzance (London: The Poetry Bookshop, 1918), by Michael Field In the Name of Time (London: The Poetry Bookshop, 1919), by Michael Field Above Mount Alverna, Iphigenia in Arsacia, The Assumption (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1930), published anonymously

Bradley and Cooper bibliography

249

essays For details of the publication of all short prose pieces in journals, please refer to Ivor C. Treby’s The Michael Field Catalogue. Here is a selection of the most substantial essays: ‘An Old Couple’, The Contemporary Review 51 (February 1887), 220–5. ‘Mid-Age’, The Contemporary Review 56 (September 1889), 431–2. ‘A Lumber-Room’, The Contemporary Review 57 (January 1890), 98–102. ‘Effigies’, The Art Review, 1.3 (March 1890).

the correspondence The letters by Bradley and Cooper that are cited in the text and identified fully in the footnotes will not be itemised individually here, but below is a list of the archives from which they are taken. Held in the British Library, London (BL): Add.MS.45851–6 Add.MS.46866–7 Held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (BOD): MS.Eng.lett.c.418 MS.Eng.lett.c.419 MS.Eng.lett.c.429 MS.Eng.lett.c.432 MS.Eng. lett. d. 120 MS.Eng.lett.e.32 MS.Eng.lett.e.33 (NB The page numbering is wrong in this volume and nos 110– 19 appear twice in succession) MS.Eng.lett.e.142 MS.Eng.lett.e.143 Held in the National Library of Scotland (NLS): Letters to John Gray: Dep. 372, nos 16, 17, 18, 20 (there are no folio numbers within these boxes so letters can only be identified by box number and date, if there is one)

the diaries The thirty volumes of Michael Field’s manuscript diaries are held in the British Library. Add.MS.46776: vol. 1 – covers October 1868–January 1869, and is written by Bradley alone while she is in Paris

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Add.MS.46777–Add.MS.46804A: vols. 2–29 – covering 1888–1914, and written by both women. These volumes are titled ‘Works and Days’ and comprise: Add.MS.46777: vol. 2 (April 1888–December 1889) Add.MS.46778: vol. 3 (1890) Add.MS.46779: vol. 4 (1891) Add.MS.46780: vol. 5 (1892) Add.MS.46781: vol. 6 (1893) Add.MS.46782: vol. 7 (1894) Add.MS.46783: vol. 8 (January–October 1895) Add.MS.46784: vol. 9 (October–December 1895) Add.MS.46785: vol. 10 (1896) Add.MS.46786: vol. 11 (1897) Add.MS.46787: vol. 12 (1898) Add.MS.46788: vol. 13 (1899) Add.MS.46789: vol. 14 (1900) Add.MS.46790: vol. 15 (1901) Add.MS.46791: vol. 16 (1902) Add.MS.46792: vol. 17 (1903) Add.MS.46793: vol. 18 (1904) Add.MS.46794: vol. 19 (1905) Add.MS.46795: vol. 20 (1906) Add.MS.46796: vol. 21 ( January–September 1907) Add.MS.46797: vol. 22 (September–December 1907) Add.MS.46798: vol. 23 (1908) Add.MS.46799: vol. 24 (1909) Add.MS.46800: vol. 25 (1910) Add.MS.46801: vol. 26 (1911) Add.MS.46802: vol. 27 (1912) Add.MS.46803: vol. 28 (1913) Add.MS.46804A: vol. 29 (1914) Add.MS.46804B: vol. 30 – a collection of loose-leaf pieces from between 1868 and 1914

The following sources are also available: Selections from the diaries: Works and Days: From the Journal of Michael Field, ed. T. and D. C. Sturge Moore, London: John Murray, 1933 (with introduction by Sir William Rothenstein)

Full reproduction of the diaries on microfilm: Michael Field and Fin-de-Sie`cle Culture and Society. The Diaries and Correspondence of Michael Field held in the British Library, ed. Marion Thain, Adam Matthew: Spring 2003 (thirteen reels of microfilm)

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251

other manuscript sources cited Bodleian Library, Oxford (BOD), MS.Eng.poet.d.74: a partial draft of Callirrhoe¨ in manuscript form with a title page signed ‘John Cooley’ MS.Eng.poet.d.75, fols. 51v–66v: draft of a speech opposing ‘the stateregulation of vice’ (KB’s hand) Huntington Library, California: manuscript copy of ‘The Iris Was Yellow’, dated c. 1890 (reference CB 36), together with a letter from Bradley to Frances Power Cobbe (also dated c. 1890): reference CB 35

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Berenson, Bernhard. Letter to ‘Michael’ (KB) (May 1892), BOD, MS.Eng.lett. e.33, fols. 116r–18v (NB the folio numbering in this collection mistakenly contains nos 110–19 twice over). Letter to Michael Field (22 December 1892), The Bernhard Berenson Treasury. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962, p. 65. Letter to ‘Michael’ (KB) (1 February 1908), BL, Add.MSS.45855, fols. 215r–216v. Berenson, Mary. A Self-Portrait from her Letters and Diaries, ed. Barbara Strachey and Jayne Samuels. New York: Norton, 1983. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972. Besant, Walter. ‘On Literary Collaboration’. The New Review 6 (1892), 200–9. Birch, Dinah. ‘ ‘‘That Ghastly Work’’: Ruskin, Animals and Anatomy’. Worldviews 4 (2000), 131–45. Blain, Virginia. ‘ ‘‘Michael Field, the Two-Headed Nightingale’’: Lesbian Text as Palimpsest’. Women’s History Review 5.2 (1996), 239–57. ‘Sexual Politics of the (Victorian) Closet; or, No Sex Please – We’re Poets’, in Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830– 1900, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999, pp. 135–63. Review of Victorian Sappho. Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23.2 (2001), 315–18. Bloom, Lynn Z. ‘ ‘‘I write for Myself and Strangers’’: Private Diaries as Public Documents’, in Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, ed. Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996, pp. 23–37. Bornstein, George. ‘The Arrangement of Browning’s Dramatic Lyrics (1842)’, in Poems in Their Place, ed. Neil Fraistat. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986, pp. 273–88. Bossche, Chris R. Vanden. Carlyle and the Search for Authority. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991. Brake, Laurel. Print in Transition, 1850–1910: Studies in Media and Book History. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Brand, Vanessa (ed.). The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1998. Bristow, Joseph. Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995. (ed.). The Fin-de-Sie`cle Poem. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005. ‘Michael Field’s Lyrical Aestheticism: Underneath the Bough’, published in reduced form in Michael Field and Their World, ed. Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson. High Wycombe: The Rivendale Press, 2007, pp. 49–62. Brooks, Chris. ‘Historicism and the Nineteenth Century’, in The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age, ed. Vanessa Brand. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1998, pp. 1–19. Brooks, Cleanth. ‘The Language of Paradox’ (1956), in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998 revised edition, pp. 58–70.

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Index

Academy, The 3, 166 Accuser, The 9 Adorno, Theodor 148 Anstruther-Thompson, Kit 47, 77 Armstrong, Isobel 212 Arnold, Matthew 31, 141, 199 Arnold, Thomas 31 Athenaeum, The 8, 43 Attila, My Attila! 36, 55 St Augustine 190--1 autobiography, spiritual autobiography -see‘life-writing’

20, 31--3, 37--40, 48, 96, 133--47, 158, 168--200 Cavalcaselle, G. B. -- see ‘Crowe, J. A. and Cavalcaselle, G. B.’ collaboration (literary) -- see ‘dual authorship’ consumption 147--65 conversion (religious) 29--30, 31, 168--200 Cooley, John 3 Cooper, Emma Harris (Lissie) 49, 119 Corbett, David Peters 77 Correggio 72 Costello, Mary 24, 51 Crowe, J. A. and Cavalcaselle, G. B. 73 Cruikshank, George 152

Baudelaire, Charles 48, 93 Beardsley, Aubrey 159 bee (and honey) 54, 130--67, 174--5, 176--7 Bell, George 122 Bellerophoˆn 3 Berenson, Bernhard 6, 24, 36, 51, 93, 136, 138, 142, 155, 158 Besant, Walter 43 Blain, Virginia 45, 100--1, 120, 173 Bloom, Lynn Z. 22 book design 130--47 Borgia 4, 8, 196--7 Bornstein, George 138 Botticelli, Sandro 67--8, 72--89 Bristol, University College 3, 12 Bristow, Joseph 92 Brooks, Chris 30 Brown, Sarah Annes 192 Browning, Robert 5, 13, 21, 43, 44, 97--8, 138 Brutus Ultor 14, 97 Bullen, A. H. 92 Burne-Jones, Edward 74 Burney, Frances 35 Callirrhoe¨ 3, 4, 5, 8, 55--6, 98 Camp 197--8 Carlyle, Thomas 31--4, 35 Catholicism, Catholic, Catholic Church 6--7, 9,

Daily Chronicle, The 10 Dale, Peter Allan 33, 204 dandy 61 Darwin, Charles 202 De Lauretis, Teresa 57, 107--8, 182, 184 Decadent, Decadence 7, 13, 14--15, 21, 73, 143, 151, 154, 169--70, 177, 178, 193, 198, 214 Dedicated 9, 126--9, 173 Delaney, J. G. Paul 11 Dellamora, Richard 46, 178 Denisoff, Dennis 197 Deutsch, Helene 107 Dial, The 6, 156 Dian: A Phantasy 9 diaries -- see ‘life-writing’ Dilthey, Wilhelm 34--5 Donne, John 113--14, 158 Donoghue, Emma 2 drama, plays 7--8, 8--9, 10, 35--41, 55--6, 75--7, 115, 147, 149, 214--15 dramatic monologue 115 dual authorship, literary collaboration 19, 43, 90--129 economics 147--65 Ehnenn, Jill 72

267

268

Index

Einstein, Albert 1, 202 ekphrasis 66--89 elegy 110 Eliot, T. S. 208 Elizabethan 91--6 Ellis, Havelock 5, 46--8, 56, 59, 155, 191 Ellmann, Richard 207 empathy 77--8 Engelberg, Edward 207 Ezekiel 141 Faderman, Lillian 45, 46 Fair Rosamund 148 Farwell, Marilyn 107 Father’s Tragedy, The 14 Fellowship of the New Life 13 fetish 56--63, 108 Fitzgerald, Edward -- see ‘Ruba´iya´t of Omar Khayya´m’ Flaubert, Gustave 69, 75, 78 Fletcher, Ian 142 Fletcher, Robert 122--3, 124 Flint, Kate 52 Fothergill, Robert A. 22, 23, 25, 26, 29 Foucault, Michel 46, 95--6 Fraistat, Neil 136, 138 Fraser, Hilary 239 Freedman, Jonathan 2, 16, 80, 114, 126, 167, 200, 203 Freud, Sigmund 57 Froude, J. A. 33 Garber, Marjorie 187 Garnett, Richard 6 Genette, Ge´rard 155 George Bell and Sons 148 Gray, John 7, 8, 25, 28, 29, 139--40, 157, 169--200 Silverpoints 142--3, 169 Spiritual Poems 169, 184--5, 193--4 Gray, John Miller 64, 66 Grosz, Elizabeth A. 59 H.D. 166, 209--14 Hall, Radclyffe 47 Hanson, Ellis 168, 169, 172, 183, 184, 193 Harper’s Bazar 8 Hegel, G. W. F. 17 Herrick, Robert 59 Higginson, T. W. 8 Hill, Edmund 190 Hobbes, John Oliver 15 Hollander, John 84 homosexual, homosexuality, invert 4, 46--65, 169, 178, 179, 183--5

Hope, Laurence 151 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 178, 186 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 140 In the Name of Time 36--40, 214 incest 191--2 Independent Theatre 7 Irigaray, Luce 101, 106, 107, 232 Isherwood, Christopher 198 James, Henry 15 Jameson, Anna 73 Janson, H. W. 80 St John the Baptist 140--1 St John of the Cross 185, 193--6 St John the Divine 141 Johnson, Lionel 6, 8, 9, 205 Judd, Catherine A. 44 Julia Domna 8 kitsch 197--8 Koestenbaum, Wayne 53, 100 Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen 155 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 184, 191, 192 Laird, Holly 1, 43, 48, 53, 105 Le Gallienne, Richard 10 Lee, Vernon 47, 77--8, 105 Lee-Hamilton, Eugene 142 Leigh, Arran and Isla 3, 7, 14 Leighton, Angela 43, 93, 100, 168 Lejeune, Philippe 22--4 lesbian 11, 45--63, 107--8, 179, 182, 232 Lessing, G. E. 66, 69, 80--3, 87 Leverson, Ada 2, 159 Levy, Amy 11 life-writing 9, 10, 14, 20--35, 118--19 spiritual autobiography 28--30 Linton, Eliza Lynn 165 Long Ago 9, 42--65, 155 lyric production 147--65 lyric utterance 90--129 Lysack, Krista 72 McCormack, Jerusha 169, 198 Maeterlinck, Maurice 153--5, 165 Malet, Lucas (Mary St Leger Kingsley) 163--5 Maltz, Diana 12 Mandeville, Bernard 152 Marcus, Laura 22, 23, 34 Marx, Karl 152 Mary, Virgin 179 Mathews, Elkin and John Lane (Bodley Head) 6 Melnyk, Julie 184 memory 144--5

Index Meredith, George 6 Mermin, Dorothy 104 A Messiah 9 Metaphysical poetry 113--14, 202 Mew, Charlotte 15 Meynell, Alice 11, 15, 202 Mill, J. S. 114 Miller, Nicholas Andrew 213 Miner, Earl 136 Mitchell, W. J. T. 79, 88 modern, modernism, modernist 29, 134--5, 149, 167, 201--14 Montefiore, Jan 117 Moore, Marie Sturge 26--7 Moore, T. Sturge 9, 22, 157, 205 Moran, Maureen 169 Moriarty, David J. 96 Morris, William 2 Moscher, Thomas 122, 125 Mystic Trees 7, 9, 173, 174--6, 179 The New Minnesinger 3, 31 New Women 13, 15, 55 Newnham College, Cambridge 3 Nietzsche, Friedrich 36--7, 137 Obrist, Hermann 24 pagan 4, 9, 20, 31--3, 39--40, 74, 80--1, 87, 128, 133--47, 158, 168--200 palimpsest 32, 158--9, 171--2, 199 Palmieri, Matteo 93 Pater, Walter 4, 39, 72--5, 80--1, 86--9, 166, 207, 208 Appreciations 39, 86--9, 203 Greek Studies 36, 39 Imaginary Portraits 67 Marius the Epicurean 39, 203 The Renaissance 16, 67, 70--1, 72--5, 80--1, 87, 93, 176--7 Peterson, Linda H. 21, 23, 28 Pionke, Katharine 188, 197 Plath, Sylvia 166 plays -- see drama Poems of Adoration 7, 9, 173, 176--7 politics 12--14 Pound, Ezra 205, 208, 211, 212, 213 Prins, Yopie 52, 60, 101, 106, 120, 165, 213 Probyn, May 103--4 pseudonym 4, 5, 15, 19, 22--3, 42--65 Psomiades, Kathy 15, 45, 151, 160, 165 Punch 74, 83 Queen Mariamne 9 A Question of Memory 7, 214--15

269

Radford, Ernest 83 Raffalovich, Andre´ 5, 48, 170, 183--4 Reigate 5, 6 Reynolds, Margaret 104 Richmond (The Paragon) 6 Ricketts, Charles 6, 13, 27, 50, 99, 127, 135--6, 138, 161--3, 170, 187, 196 on painting 69, 77 book design 130, 148, 150, 156--7, 159, 169 Robinson, A. Mary F. 5, 6, 102--3, 104--6, 166 Roden, Frederick S. 179, 201 Rolland, Romain 28 ‘romantic friendship’ 45--51 Romantic literature 93, 94, 158, 201 Rossetti, Christina 182 Rossetti, D. G. 6, 9, 59, 69, 74, 83--4, 131 Rothenstein, William 13 Rowlinson, Matthew 112 Ruba´iya´t of Omar Khayya´m 90--6, 223 Ruskin, John 2, 3--4, 5, 30, 44, 74, 81 Guild of St George 13 Russell, George 208 Sappho 31, 42--65, 101, 104, 162, 209--14 Saville, Julia 72, 74 Schaffer, Talia 15, 61, 164 Schreiner, Olive 236 Sedgwick, Eve 196 Sencourt, Robert 194 sexology 46--65, 191--2 Shakespeare, William 8, 92--6, 111--12, 181 Shannon, Charles 6, 50, 135 Shaw, W. David 118 Sight and Song 9, 10, 11, 70--89, 155 Skipsey, Joseph 142 Small, Ian 11 socialism 12--14, 153 Sontag, Susan 197--8 Spencer, Herbert 6 Staten, Henry 110 Stephania 14 Sturgeon, Mary 2, 3, 12, 36, 43, 122 Swinburne, Algernon 54--5, 73, 94, 141--2, 160 Symonds, John Addington 73, 74 Symons, Arthur 8, 10 synaesthesia 70, 71 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 30, 110--13, 118, 134, 143, 151 Thornton, R. K. R. 11 Tiresias 60--1 The Tragedy of Pardon 9 The Tragic Mary 14 Treby, Ivor C. 10

270 Trinity 139, 185--97 Tristan de Leonois 9 T. W. H see T. W. Higginson 8 Tynan, Katharine 205 Underneath the Bough 9, 11, 63, 90--129, 133, 143, 182, 186 Unwin, T. Fisher 148 Vadillo, Ana Parejo 70--89, 149 Vale Press, The 6, 8, 148 Vanita, Ruth 58, 179 Vasari, Georgio 69 Verlaine, Paul 67, 238 Vicinus, Martha 48 Vico, Giambattista 31 vivisection and anti-vivisection 3, 13--14 Watson, Rosamund Marriott 11

Index The Wattlefold 10, 116--20, 173, 177--8, 180--5 Webb, Ruth 68 Wharton, H. T. 52, 209 White, Chris 50, 60, 178, 192 Whym Chow 6, 33, 137, 170, 185--200 Whym Chow: Flame of Love 9, 25--7, 173, 188--200 Wild Honey from Various Thyme 8, 9, 32, 125--6, 130--67, 168--9, 171--2, 174, 200, 206, 208 Wilde, Oscar 6, 9, 159, 169, 199, 213 The Picture of Dorian Gray 69, 170 Poems 142, 150 ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ 93 The World at Auction 14, 149 Yaeger, Patricia 166 Yeats, W. B. 140, 205--9 The Yellow Book 14--15

cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture General Editor Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge

Titles published 1. The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction The Art of Being Ill M I R I A M B A I L I N , Washington University 2. Muscular Christianity Embodying the Victorian Age E D I T E D B Y D O N A L D E . H A L L , California State University, Northridge 3. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art H E R B E R T S U S S M A N , Northeastern University, Boston 4. Byron and the Victorians A N D R E W E L F E N B E I N , University of Minnesota 5. Literature in the Marketplace Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and the Circulation of Books E D I T E D B Y J O H N O . J O R D A N , University of California, Santa Cruz and robert l. patten, Rice University, Houston 6. Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry L I N D S A Y S M I T H , University of Sussex 7. Charlotte Bronte¨ and Victorian Psychology S A L L Y S H U T T L E W O R T H , University of Sheffield 8. The Gothic Body Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Sie`cle K E L L Y H U R L E Y , University of Colorado at Boulder 9. Rereading Walter Pater W I L L I A M F . S H U T E R , Eastern Michigan University 10. Remaking Queen Victoria Yale University and adrienne munich, State University of New York, Stony Brook

EDITED BY MARGARET HOMANS,

11. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels P A M E L A K . G I L B E R T , University of Florida

12. Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature A L I S O N B Y E R L Y , Middlebury College, Vermont 13. Literary Culture and the Pacific V A N E S S A S M I T H , University of Sydney 14. Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel Women, Work and Home MONICA F. COHEN 15. Victorian Renovations of the Novel Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation S U Z A N N E K E E N , Washington and Lee University, Virginia 16. Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth G A I L M A R S H A L L , University of Leeds 17. Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origin C A R O L Y N D E V E R , Vanderbilt University, Tennessee 18. Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy S O P H I E G I L M A R T I N , Royal Holloway, University of London 19. Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre DEBORAH VLOCK

20. After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance J O H N G L A V I N , Georgetown University, Washington DC 21. Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question E D I T E D B Y N I C O L A D I A N E T H O M P S O N , Kingston University, London 22. Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry M A T T H E W C A M P B E L L , University of Sheffield 23. Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire Public Discourse and the Boer War P A U L A M . K R E B S , Wheaton College, Massachusetts 24. Ruskin’s God MICHAEL WHEELER,

University of Southampton

25. Dickens and the Daughter of the House H I L A R Y M . S C H O R , University of Southern California 26. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science R O N A L D R . T H O M A S , Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut

27. Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology J A N - M E L I S S A S C H R A M M , Trinity Hall, Cambridge 28. Victorian Writing about Risk Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World E L A I N E F R E E D G O O D , University of Pennsylvania 29. Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture L U C Y H A R T L E Y , University of Southampton 30. The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study T H A D L O G A N , Rice University, Houston 31. Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940 D E N N I S D E N I S O F F , Ryerson University, Toronto 32. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 P A M E L A T H U R S C H W E L L , University College London 33. Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature N I C O L A B O W N , Birkbeck, University of London 34. George Eliot and the British Empire N A N C Y H E N R Y The State University of New York, Binghamton 35. Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture C Y N T H I A S C H E I N B E R G , Mills College, California 36. Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body A N N A K R U G O V O Y S I L V E R , Mercer University, Georgia 37. Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust A N N G A Y L I N , Yale University 38. Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 A N N A J O H N S T O N , University of Tasmania 39. London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 M A T T C O O K , Keele University 40. Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland G O R D O N B I G E L O W , Rhodes College, Tennessee 41. Gender and the Victorian Periodical H I L A R Y F R A S E R , Birkbeck, University of London, Judith Johnston and stephanie green, University of Western Australia 42. The Victorian Supernatural EDITED BY NICOLA BOWN,

Birkbeck College, London, Carolyn Burdett,

London Metropolitan University, and pamela thurschwell, University College London 43. The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination G A U T A M C H A K R A V A R T Y , University of Delhi 44. The Revolution in Popular Literature Print, Politics and the People I A N H A Y W O O D , Roehampton University of Surrey 45. Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature G E O F F R E Y C A N T O R , University of Leeds, Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester, graeme gooday, University of Leeds, richard noakes, University of Cambridge, sally shuttleworth, University of Sheffield, and jonathan r. topham, University of Leeds 46. Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain from Mary Shelley to George Eliot J A N I S M C L A R R E N C A L D W E L L , Wake Forest University 47. The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf E D I T E D B Y C H R I S T I N E A L E X A N D E R , University of New South Wales, and Juliet McMaster, University of Alberta 48. From Dickens to Dracula Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction G A I L T U R L E Y H O U S T O N , University of New Mexico 49. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller I V A N K R E I L K A M P , University of Indiana 50. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture J O N A T H A N S M I T H , University of Michigan-Dearborn 51. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture P A T R I C K R . O ’ M A L L E Y , Georgetown University 52. Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain S I M O N D E N T I T H , University of Gloucestershire 53. Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal H E L E N A M I C H I E , Rice University 54. The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture N A D I A V A L M A N , University of Southampton 55. Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature J U L I A W R I G H T , Dalhousie University 56. Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination S A L L Y L E D G E R , Birkbeck, University of London

57. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability G O W A N D A W S O N , University of Leicester 58. ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Sie`cle M A R I O N T H A I N , University of Birmingham