Michael Field

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Standard Name: Field, Michael
Birth Name: Catherine Harris Bradley
Self-constructed Name: Katharine Harris Bradley
Nickname: Michael
Pseudonym: Arran Leigh
Birth Name: Edith Emma Cooper
Nickname: Henry
Pseudonym: Isla Leigh
Self-constructed Name: Michael Field
Used Form: Katharine Harris Bradley
Used Form: Edith Cooper
As MF , Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Cooper published twenty-seven tragedies, mostly verse dramas on historical or classical subjects. Only one of their plays was staged, and it received poor reviews. Their unique literary collaboration also produced eight collections of poetry, one of which pays tribute to Sappho . Selections from their journal and letters appeared posthumously. Their Greek paganism influenced their earliest works, while their conversion to Roman Catholicism left its mark on later ones. Although MF 's work fell out of favour with most readers and critics early in her career, this collaborative oeuvre has enjoyed a recent renaissance.
Photo of Michael Field (that is, of Katherine Harris Bradley, left, and Edith Emma Cooper. right) from the waist up, leaning toward each other. They are wearing plain black dresses.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Sappho
Since the late 1890s Sappho has been claimed by many lesbian writers, including Michael Field , H. D. , and Judy Grahn , not only as a writing role model but as a crucial forerunner...
Friends, Associates John Ruskin
JR 's social and intellectual network was extensive: amongst his acquaintances were Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning , Elizabeth Gaskell , Violet Hunt , Jean Ingelow , Flora Shaw , Jane Welsh Carlyle and Thomas Carlyle
Friends, Associates Robert Browning
In his later years RB became ensconced among London's cultural elite. He carried on a close friendships through correspondence and some visits with Julia Wedgwood and Isa Blagden —he also assisted Blagden's writing career. He...
Friends, Associates Frances Power Cobbe
There she met and became a friend of Violet Paget , who was then newly published under the pseudonym Vernon Lee. By the early 1890s, FPC had become friendly with another late Victorian writer: Katharine Bradley
Friends, Associates Constance Naden
CN was a friend of the two poets who shared the name Michael Field (who also came from Birmingham) and of the medical doctor Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (who presumably did not hold against her the...
Friends, Associates Walter Pater
From his time at BrasenoseWP knew Oscar Browning . In Oxford and London he socialized with Edmund Gosse , Algernon Charles Swinburne , Simeon Solomon , Oscar Wilde , Vernon Lee , A. Mary F. Robinson
Intertextuality and Influence Sappho
Following Michael Field , many twentieth-century, lesbian-identified writers treat Sappho as a crucial precursor. She became a figure for modernism with the work of HD and Virginia Woolf . The Lavender Nation was named from...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Helme
The Critical reviewed this novel two months after publication. It goes unmentioned by Virgil B. Heltzel in Fair Rosamond. A Study of the Development of a Literary Theme, 1947. Those preceding Helme in treating...
Intertextuality and Influence Christina Rossetti
CR was mourned in a sonnet by Michael Field shortly after her death. Her influence extended to many other poets of her own time or close to it, including Gerard Manley Hopkins , Rosamund Marriott Watson
Literary responses Sappho
This inspired, among others, Amy Levy ,
Gubar, Susan. “Multiple personality”. Women’s Review of Books, No. 12, pp. 13 -14.
13
Michael Field , Natalie Barney , Renée Vivien , and Colette .
Literary responses Constance Naden
William R. Hughes provided for the Midland Naturalist a review of this book which CN called kind.
Hughes, William Richard, Charles Lapworth, W. A. Tilden, and Robert Lewins. Constance Naden: A Memoir. Bickers and Son, 1890.
38-9
. The Woman's World (edited by Oscar Wilde ) gave the book one of its several...
Literary responses Constance Naden
George Saintsbury , writing in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, grouped CN as a poet with Mathilde Blind , Amy Levy , and Michael Field . He called her writing a...
Other Life Event John Ruskin
Katharine Harris Bradley , one of the writers who published as Michael Field , was rejected as a member of the Guild when she confessed her aetheism. Bradley's beliefs infuriated Ruskin; in one letter he...
Reception Sappho
Among the earliest of Sappho 's translators into English was Anne Finch ; among recent translators is Mary Barnard , 1958. Stevie Smith declined to take her on. Finch chose to render not a love-poem...
Textual Features Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
The historical Sappho had emerged by this date as a potentially lesbian or bisexual figure, for instance in the work of Swinburne ; Michael Field 's Long Ago was published this same year. Dawson's Sappho...

Timeline

1894
Eragny Press was founded in London by Esther and Lucien Pissarro .