'Michael Field'
Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle

Marion Thain recounts the development of this fascinating poetic persona, created by two female writers.

Marion Thain (Author)

9780521147736, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 24 June 2010

286 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.42 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Written with precision and clarity…' Women: A Cultural Review

'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, which 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 siècle, 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.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: 'something fierce, subtle, strange, singular'
1. The diaries and dramas: life-writing and the temporal patterns of aestheticism
2. Long Ago: the male pseudonym, fin-de-siècle sexualities and Sappho's historical leap
3. Sight and Song: Botticelli and ekphrastic paradox
4. Underneath The Bough: dual authorship and lyric song
5. Wild Honey from Various Thyme: apian aestheticism and the lyric book collection
6. The Catholic poetry: the spiritual and historical 'turn' of the century
Conclusion: modernism and the fin de siècle
Notes
Bibliography of material by Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper
General bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literature: history & criticism [DS]