If ever two female poets were going to clutch hands and drive off a cliff together, it would be Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper.
It began as a kind of Victorian lesbian Lolita story: the elder, Katherine Bradley, agreed to act as guardian for her disabled sister’s daughter, Edith, who was sixteen years her junior. Katherine was independently wealthy and an avid translator and poet. When Edith began college, Katharine attended with her. Their relationship quickly turned romantic—intensely so—and they united under the pseudonym “Michael Field” in 1884. From verse, to plays, to letters and journals, everything they wrote was penned jointly, to the extent that even they lost track of who wrote what. Ultimately, the two women under one name crafted “a canon that includes more than 25 closet dramas and 11 volumes of poetry.”
Michelle Lee tells their fantastic story over at the Poetry Foundation, where she explores the not necessarily dated bias against women writers, but also the Victorian distaste for “collaborative creativity.”
Masked as Michael Field, Cooper and Bradley steered outside the mores of their time as much in their sexuality as in their writing. They made verse of their lives, their sexual and spiritual union, and other topics that readers of their time would never have tolerated from a woman. Robert Browning knew who held the pen from the start. He hailed the author Michael Field a genius, but ultimately disclosed their secret, leaving their accomplishments to be twisted into gossip. But the women lived out their lives together, never gave up writing, and died of cancer within a year of each other.
In a previous article, “A Journey to Performing Michael Field,” Lee looks more deeply at her relationship to her subjects, and recounts her own theatrical incarnation of Michael Field. It’s a mask about a mask, a layering effect that Lee aptly judges to be a certain state of womanhood. The pseudonym Michael Field represented “a cover under which to claim masculine rights and desires.” Like Bradley and Cooper, Lee describes having “defined myself by masks people gave me” and easily understands how living as one under a man’s name would permit the two authors the freedom to be “women, man, god, goddess, muse, poet, all at once. Michael Field embodied all.”
