The University of Hull The Poetic Oeuvre of „Michael Field‟: Collaboration, Aestheticism and Desire in the Writings of Katharine Harris Bradley (1846 – 1914) and Edith Emma Cooper (1862 – 1913) being a Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Hull by Matthew William Mitton, BA (Hons.), MA (Dist.) September 2008 Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to express my gratitude to the members of the Department of English, University of Hull, for their sustained support throughout the course of this project. Especially, I would like to thank my supervisor, Ann Heilmann, for her patience, encouragement and excellent guidance over the last two years. My thanks also go to Angela Leighton for her advice in the early stages of this project. Jane Thomas deserves particular mention for being the person who introduced me to Michael Field in the first place as an undergraduate and for many helpful discussions on late nineteenth century literature in general. I would like to express my gratitude to the University of Hull for the award of a three year scholarship which made this project possible, as well as the Carl Baron Memorial Fund for a cash award in late 2006 which enabled the purchase of essential research materials. I am greatly indebted to Leonie Sturge Moore and her sister, Charmian O‟Neal, for their kind permission to quote from the unpublished papers of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper. I am also grateful to Colin Harris and Patricia Buckingham of the Bodleian Library for their help in accessing the Michael Field collection in their care, the staff of the Harvard University Library for their swift response to my enquiries, as well as the personnel of the Brynmor Jones Library. Thanks are also due to Trudi Tate, who, as reviews editor for Women: A Cultural Review, enabled me to keep up to date with the latest critical works on Michael Field to emerge while this project was under way. Mark Llewellyn was also helpful in alerting me to many journal articles which might have otherwise proved elusive for some time. David Wheatley offered great assistance in translating Latin quotations and titles. I should also like to acknowledge the many booksellers and dealers in rare editions – particularly Philip J. Piragees and John Hart – who have helped in sourcing a great deal of the original material which I draw on in this thesis. I would particularly like to thank Anesh Kumar, Tony Harewood, Sharon Hodgson and Barbara Wilson for their friendship and support over the years, and for their encouragement of a project which has often rendered me an absent presence. Especial thanks must go to Peter and Jeanette Riley and Alan and Joyce Measures for all of their many kind enquires and encouraging words, practical and moral support, not to mention their consistent and steady confidence in me and my work. I dedicate this work to my niece and nephew, Aimée and Adam Ashton. However, overall, this is for my mother and father, Wendy and Bill Mitton, in endless gratitude for their constant patience, understanding, and financial and moral support far above and beyond the call of duty. They have ensured that I had a peaceful and nurturing atmosphere to retire to and write-up the bulk of this thesis. Without their unwavering belief in me, not a page of this could have been written. Abbreviations NM: The New Minnesinger (1875) B: Bellerophôn (1881) LA: Long Ago (1889) TM: The Tragic Mary (1890) SS: Sight and Song (1892) UTBa: Underneath the Bough (1893) UTBb: Underneath the Bough, Revised and Decreased (1893) UTBc: Underneath the Bough, American Edition (1898) WH: Wild Honey from Various Thyme (1908) PA: Poems of Adoration (1912) MT: Mystic Trees (1913) WC: Whym Chow: Flame of Love (1914) D: Dedicated (1914) SP: A Selection from the Poems of Michael Field (1923) WD: Works and Days: From the Journal of Michael Field (1933) Contents Introduction (1) Chapter 1. Becoming Michael Field: „Arran & Isla Leigh‟ (28) Chapter 2. „Manifold Desire‟: Voicing Sappho‟s Songs in Long Ago (1889) (58) Chapter 3. „Implicating Eyes‟: The Poetics and Sexual Politics of Ekphrasis in Sight and Song (1892) (88) Chapter 4. „Issues of Heart and Mind‟: Courtly Postures and Song in Underneath the Bough (1893, 1893 & 1898) (119) Chapter 5. „For That Moment Only‟: The Poetics of Prose (149) Chapter 6. „Ancient Law of Pleasure‟: from Profane to Sacred in Wild Honey from Various Thyme (1908) (173) Chapter 7. Separate Voices, United Passions: Style and Desire in Poems of Adoration (1912) and Mystic Trees (1913) (204) Conclusion: Closing the Circle (234) Bibliography (251) Introduction The last few decades have witnessed an immense resurgence in critical and academic interest in the lives and writings of nineteenth-century women poets, many of whom had been forgotten or ignored for the greater part of the twentieth century. From the 1970s onwards there has been a steady increase of articles, monographs and critical editions which have sought to reclaim and reinstate such seminal figures as Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Mew. Few would now deny that writers such as Barrett Browning and Rossetti are major figures of Victorian poetry, as integral to the canon as Robert Browning, Swinburne or Tennyson, but for nearly a century, despite their formidable reputation in their own time (both women were considered for the position of Poet Laureate), their work was dismissed as minor, inferior to their male peers, and they were allowed to fall from view. Their recovery ran parallel with the rise of feminist studies in the 1970s, which saw the resurrection and reappraisal of these forgotten, suppressed voices as being central to the intellectual cause.1 One of the more curious, idiosyncratic voices of women‟s poetry to re-emerge and take centre stage at the close of the nineteenth century – and to be rediscovered at the fin de millennium – was that of „Michael Field‟. There have been very few poets quite like Michael Field, both at the fin de siècle, or, indeed, at any other time. What on the surface appeared quite commonplace was in truth anything but orthodox: not only was Michael Field not male, he was two women, Katharine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper, which Stevie Smith termed „that odd amalgam of aunt and niece‟ (Smith 1981: 181). Following on from the publication of a few early verse dramas, there was a great deal of speculation in literary circles about the emergence of a new poetic presence, a young male poet whose classical learning and accomplishment in blank verse drew comparisons to Shakespeare.2 The extent of Michael Field‟s impact (and the effect of 1 In 1975 Germaine Greer edited an edition of Rossetti‟s Goblin Market – which, as Tom Paulin states, „initiated the rediscovery of her poetry‟ (Paulin 2005: 222) – this was duly followed by Cora Kaplan‟s major re-issue of Barrett Browning‟s Aurora Leigh in 1978. 2 In his critical assessment on Michael Field in Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century (1893), Lionel Johnson asserted of the verse dramas that: „Michael Field, at her highest point of excellence, writes with an imagination, an ardour, a magnificence, in degree far lower, in kind not other, than the imagination, the ardour, the magnificence of Shakespeare‟ (Johnson 1893: 308). 6 the pseudonym) can be glimpsed in a fascinating letter which Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to Robert Bridges on Holy Thursday 1885, after hearing that the latter was due to meet the young author, Michael Field, at a forthcoming literary gathering: I had almost forgotten to say that Michael Field is the author of Callirrhoe [sic], Fair Rosamund, and other plays one or all published very lately and much praised by the critics. He is a dramatist: nought which concerns the drama concerns not him, he thinks. It might indeed do him good to know that you had never heard of him, but I hope you will not let him make up a trio of enemies (spretae injuria formae you know) with Marzials and Hall Caine. [….] M. F. may perhaps be Irish: Field is a common, Michael a very common Irish name. Do be wise. (Hopkins 1935: 215) Hopkins‟s letter reveals the extent to which the fame of Michael Field had spread by 1885, and also that the male name was working. But more importantly, perhaps, the letter reveals the complex political nature of male dominated literary circles. The critics may praise this new writer, „he‟ may be an accomplished dramatist – or so „he thinks‟ – but he is not to be allowed to get above his station just yet. (It may do him good to know he has yet to impress himself upon the elder literary lions). But then again, Hopkins cautions Bridges against making an enemy of him: united with other young male writers he could become a potentially dangerous element. It is interesting that Hopkins thinks „him‟ to be Irish; Michael Field was such a blank canvas that his audience could literally imagine him to be who they pleased. But this strategy had its dangers, as another letter from Hopkins to Bridges a year later on 26 November 1886 illustrates. By this time Hopkins had learnt of the identity which lay behind the male name: „Sputters of poetry by Michael Field appear now in every week‟s Academy, vastly clever, pointed, and flowing, but serving in the end to shew [sic] Coventry Patmore was right in his opinion of women‟s poetry‟3 (Hopkins 1935: 245). Hopkins does not hide his admiration of this lyric verse,4 but he is now able to dismiss it on the grounds of gender.