Michael Field, The Poet: Published and Manuscript Materials (Broadview Editions) - Softcover

Katherine Bradley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551116758 ISBN 13: 9781551116754

Publisher: Broadview Press, 2009

Synopsis

"Michael Field" was the literary pseudonym of two women, Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862-1913). The women were poets, playwrights, diarist, and lovers who lived and wrote together during the final decades of the nineteenth century up to World War I. Their arresting poetry has recently gained them a place in the canon, and their extensive engagement with other writers puts them at the centre of fin de siècle literary culture.

This Broadview Edition offers selections from all published books of poetry by Michael Field, and a substantial section of transcriptions from largely unpublished manuscript letters and diaries that gives insight into the extraordinary life and work of the authors. A critical introduction, bibliography, and selection of contemporary reviews are also included.

About this title

Review

"This selection from the extensive oeuvre of the two women, aunt and niece, who called themselves 'Michael Field, ' is a revelation. The editors have given us the most generous selection of the poems to date. The cold fire of Michael Field's lyricism, its compact, enigmatic language, is fully contextualized in the poet's debt to Nietzsche, to late century aestheticism, Hellenism, and feminism. The joint diary and the letters of this astonishing poet, with their intellectual astringency, wit, and frankly sensuous homoeroticism, and their acquaintance with major figures of aesthetic culture Pater, Vernon Lee, Browning, and the Berensons enable us to read the late nineteenth-century's modernism in a wholly new way." -- Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, University of London

"The two women who loved and wrote as 'Michael Field' feature in recent histories of Victorian sexuality, but this collection convincingly demonstrates their importance in the history of British poetry. A balanced and informative introduction and generous selections highlight the breadth of elements their lyrics synthesized--ancient Greek and Persian, Elizabethan, German, French, Roman Catholic, and even painterly. Extracts from Bradley and Cooper's journals and correspondence place them amidst aesthetes and critics from Ruskin and Wilde to Berenson, although contemporary reviews show them denied proper recognition. This anthology surveys a unique literary partnership that both reflected and influenced the main artistic currents of turn-of-the-century Britain." -- Margaret Stetz, University of Delaware

"Perhaps the most important of the year's publications, in terms of its effect on the future direction of Victorian poetry studies, was Michael Field, the Poet: Published and Manuscript Materials, edited by Ana Parejo Vadillo and Marion Thain. Bringing together a wide range of writings by the two women who worked under the name 'Michael Field', this single-volume edition is a product of the growing scholarly interest in this important fin-de-siècle writer, and it will surely be a spur to further work on the poet." -- review in The Nineteenth Century: The Victorian Period

About the Author

Marion Thain is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Ana Parejo Vadillo is Lecturer in English at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1551116758
• ISBN 13: 9781551116754
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 384