Michael Field in Context
Published on 25. September 2025
Book
Hardback
382 pages
978-1-009-38262-5 (ISBN)
Description
Few authors attract as much fascination as 'Michael Field', the collaborative pseudonym of Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913), an aunt and niece living and working together in devoted fellowship. As Michael Field, Bradley and Cooper published over thirty volumes of poetry and verse drama across a career lasting from the 1880s to the 1910s. Here, chapters by thirty-six experts introduce the historical and cultural contexts crucial to understanding Field's work, including the late-Victorian aesthetic and decadent movements, fin-de-siecle poetry, and debates around gender and sexuality. Michael Field's connections with other authors, including Wilde, Pater, and New Women writers are also explored. Experimental in lyric poetry, ekphrasis, verse drama, and the prose poem, and fascinated by the ancient worlds of Greece, Rome and Egypt, the Renaissance, and the Romantic era, Michael Field's work remains profoundly relevant to current debates, including ecology, race, empire, and gender non-conformity.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
703 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-009-38262-5 (9781009382625)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Sarah Parker is Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She is the author of Form and Modernity in Women's Poetry (2024) and The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity (2013), and co-editor of Michael Field, For That Moment Only and Other Prose Works (2022) and Michael Field: Decadent Moderns (2019).
Content
Part I. Works and Days: Biographical Contexts: 1. Becoming 'Michael Field' LeeAnne M. Richardson; 2. Michael Field's diary: works and days Carolyn Dever; 3. Michael Field's letters Sharon A. Bickle; 4. Collaborative authorship Heather Bozant Witcher; 5. Queering the house beautiful: Michael Field's aesthetic interiors Ana Parejo Vadillo; 6. Michael Field's Catholicism Lewis H. Whitaker; Part II. Forms and Genres: 7. Michael Field and lyric Emily Harrington; 8. Michael Field and verse drama Annmarie Steffes; 9. Michael Field's short prose Isobel Sigley; 10. Ekphrasis in Sight and Song Dominique Gracia; 11. Michael Field's love lyrics Sarah E. Kersh; 12. Sonnets Catherine Maxwell; 13. Devotional poetry J. D. Stone; 14. Whym Chow: flame of love and animal poetry Caroline Baylis-Green; Part III. In the Name of Time: Michael Field and History: 15. Long Ago: Ancient Greece and sapphic poetics Isobel Hurst; 16. Ancient Egypt Eleanor Dobson; 17. Roman decadence Tara Thomas; 18. The Renaissance Hilary Fraser; 19. Romanticism and the sublime Andrea Gazzaniga; Part IV. 'Be Contemporaneous': Michael Field in Their Own Time: 20. Michael Field, Walter Pater, and queer aestheticism Dustin Friedman; 21. The new woman and late-Victorian feminism Margaret D. Stetz; 22. Michael Field and Oscar Wilde Joseph Bristow; 23. French decadence Jessica Gossling; 24. Michael Field among the women poets Linda K. Hughes; 25. Late-Victorian theatre and the new drama Catherine Quirk; 26. Aesthetic book design Nicholas Frankel; Part V. Afterlives and Future Fields: 27. Michael Field and post-Victorian decadence Kristin Mahoney; 28. Michael Field and modernism Sarah Parker; 29. Queer studies Kate Thomas; 30. Ecology Dennis Denisoff; 31. Illness, disability, and crip studies Jill R. Ehnenn; 32. Transgender and non-binary identities Frankie Dytor; 33. Race and empire Alex Murray; 34. Michael Field in the digital age, Peter Melville Logan; 35. Performing Michael Field: interview with Sophie Goldrick and Tom Floyd, Shadow Opera Sarah Parker.