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The Early Drama of Michael Field, 1884-1895 Kirby, J

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The Early Drama of Michael Field, 1884-1895 Kirby, J WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch Heroines, Anti-Heroines and New Women: The Early Drama of Michael Field, 1884-1895 Kirby, J. This is an electronic version of a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Westminster. © Miss Johanna Kirby, 2017. The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the URL of WestminsterResearch: ((http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). In case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail [email protected] Heroines, Anti-Heroines and New Women: The Early Drama of Michael Field, 1884- 1895 Johanna Susan Kirby A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Westminster for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2017 Abstract This thesis represents an analysis of five dramatic works by Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913) who wrote under the collaborative literary pseudonym “Michael Field” for nearly forty years from the late 1800s to their deaths. These are: Callirrhoë (1884), Fair Rosamund (1884), The Tragic Mary (1890), Stephania (1892), and Attila, My Attila! (1895). Although more recently Michael Field’s poetry has become the subject of more academic attention, here is currently little critical work on the Fields’ twenty-seven tragic dramas, and, as yet, no sustained analysis of individual plays. Over the course of five chapters, this thesis takes a new approach to these little known dramas and their eponymous heroines, carefully locating each one within both the context of the Fields’ lives, and the wider socio-cultural and political contexts which surround each play. It is the contention of this thesis, that through their dramatic writing, the Fields were engaging with a wide range of challenging issues, debates and concerns concerning the positioning and construction of middle-class female identity, role and sexuality. Through these analyses then, this study will consider the development of the Fields’ dramatic writing and identity as female dramatists within the wider social, cultural, literary, economic and political landscape. Contents Introduction 1 “Michael Field” – Dramatist(s) Chapter One 21 Female Education and Political Activism in Callirrhoë (1884): Mænads, Social Change, and ‘Speaking Out’. Chapter Two 62 Fair Rosamund (1884): Victorian Medievalism and the ‘Prison of Womanhood’. Chapter Three 103 The Tragic Mary (1890): Clothes, Costume, Cross-Dressing and the negotiation of new female identities at the Fin-de-Siècle. Chapter Four 147 Stephania: A Trialogue (1892): Murder, Revenge and Sex at the Fin-de-Siècle. Chapter Five 178 Attila, My Attila! (1895) and the New Woman: Sexual Oppression, Silence and Perverse Desires. Conclusion 211 Bibliography 214 Acknowledgements I would like to express my special appreciation and thanks to my supervisor Dr Simon Avery for his endless patience and support. I would like to thank my other supervisors, Dr Leigh Wilson and Dr Anne Witchard, neither of whom lost faith that this thesis would get finished. I would also like to thank the English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies department at the University of Westminster and the Graduate School for all their support and encouragement over the years. I declare that all the material contained in this thesis is my own work. To my mother and father For making this all possible Introduction “Michael Field” – Dramatist(s) Edith Emma Cooper (1862-1913) died on 13 December 1913, and was followed, only nine months later on 26 September 1914 by Katharine Harris Bradley (1846-1914), her aunt, lover and lifelong literary collaborator.1 Katharine Bradley was born in Birmingham on 26 October 1846. Her father was a tobacco manufacturer, who died when she was only two, and she grew up with her mother and sister Emma Bradley, eleven years her senior. Emma married James Robert Cooper in 1860 and had two daughters, Edith, (born 12 January 1862), and Amy, (born 5 March 1865). An invalid after the birth of Amy, Katherine Bradley went to live with her sister in July 1867, and at the age of eighteen, became her niece Edith Cooper’s guardian. Bradley attended both the Collegé du France in Paris and Newnham College, Cambridge, and as Cooper reached her late teens, they attended University College Bristol together studying classics and philosophy. Financially comfortable and highly educated, the women shared powerful literary aspirations and ambitions. After their time at Bristol, the women began to write collaboratively and in 1884 published their first two verse dramas, Callirrhoë, Fair Rosamund, under their pseudonym “Michael Field”. For the next four decades the women shared a passionate intellectual and literary partnership, living, working and travelling together across Britain and Europe. In 1899, after the death of Edith Cooper’s father and Amy’s marriage, they settled at 1, Paragon in 1 I have kept the biographical background here fairly limited, as there are a number of excellent and extensive reference works on their lives. See, for example, Emma Donoghue, We are Michael Field (Bath: Absolute Press, 1998). 1 Richmond, what Katharine Bradley called “our married home”, where they were to live together until their deaths. Bradley and Cooper’s literary output totals some eight books of verse including Long Ago (1889), Sight and Song (1892) and Underneath the Bough (1893); twenty-seven dramas (publishing sometimes as many as three a year); as well as thirty volumes of their collaborative diary, “Works and Days” available in the British Library archive. The Fields’ productivity and output across their forty years of collaborative writing is extraordinary. Apart from these published works (and their extensive diaries) there is a wealth of unpublished and unfinished materials, some of which were published posthumously. Although they are now remembered principally as poets, their insistence on working in multiple genres throughout their lives meant that poetry was but one of many aspects of their output and ‘identity’ as “Michael Field” and as women writers. The legacy of their prolific life-writing and correspondence, for example, represents a vast resource of information on their insights and interactions with key cultural, philosophical and artistic contemporaries, such as John Ruskin, Arthur Symons, George Meredith and Oscar Wilde. Bradley and Cooper also engaged with a number of other kinds of political and critical writing too. Bradley’s activism for political causes such as that for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, for example, saw her not only write political treatises, but even participate in public debates, and Cooper had a number of articles on literary criticism published, one of which initiated their close relationship with Robert Browning.2 The vast spectrum of 2 Badle gae a talk o the state egulatio of ie i De Haag i the id-1880s. This political commitment is explored in Chapte Oe of this stud. See Edith Coope, Jocoseria B Roet Boig, Modern Thought: An Independent Review of Politics, Religion, Science, Art and Literature 5.7, no. 55 (1 July 1883): 297-300. 2 their writing bespeaks a strident determination on their part to fulfil their desire for self-expression, to “speak out”.3 They had “many things to say”, and employed a wide range of genres and textual spaces through which to make themselves heard.4 Katharine Bradley’s literary debut was as a poet, with her first publication The New Minnesinger and Other Poems (1875). Bradley and Cooper as Michael Field, published seven collections of poetry between 1889 and 1914: Long Ago (1889), Sight and Song (1892), Underneath the Bough (1893), Wild Honey From Various Thyme (1908), Poems of Adoration (1912), Mystic Trees (1913) and Whym Chow: Flame of Love (1914). These collections display a startling array of subjects and explore wide ranging themes and ideas. In the Fields first poetic effort Long Ago they engage with the fragmentary works of the poet Sappho, expanding them into poems of their own, which, in turn, are narrated by Sappho. Marion Thain notes that particularly in this work, as Michael Field, Bradley and cooper are “able to claim the masculine authority of classical scholarship and use it transgressively, for their own purposes”5 In Long Ago, the poems are “written by two women, writing as a man writing as Sappho?” what Yopie Prins, in her article “Michael Field:Sappho Doubled” identifies as allowing the Fields to perform the feminine by writing as a man writing as a woman, exposing femininity as a charade through the playing out of a poetic gender drama.6 The Fields also chose the poetic form to declare themselves “poets and lovers evermore”, in “It was deep April” from their collection Underneath the Bough (1893). Sight and Song’s concern with the double critical gaze of two women and the gendered 3 Katharine Bradley to Robert Browning, 23 November 1884, reproduced in Works and Days; From the Journal of Michael Field, ed. T & D. C. Sturge Moore (London: John Murray, 1933), 6. 4 Katharine Bradley to Robert Browning, 23 November 1884, Works and Days, 6. 5 Marion Thain, Michael Field and Poetic Identity (London: The Eighteen Nineties Society, 2000), 28. 6 Yopie Prins, Geek Maeads, Vitoia Spistes, in Victorian Sexual Dissidence,
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