“Against the World”: Michael Field, Female Marriage and the Aura of Amateurism

Abstract

This article considers the case of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, an aunt and niece who lived and wrote together as “Michael Field” in the fin-de-siècle Aesthetic movement. Bradley's bold statement that she and Cooper were “closer married” than the Brownings forms the basis for a discussion of their partnership in terms of a “female marriage”, a union that is reflected, as I will argue, in the pages of their writings. However, Michael Field's exclusively collaborative output, though extensive, was no guarantee for success. On the contrary, their case illustrates the notion, valid for most products of co-authorship, that the jointly written work is always surrounded by an aura of amateurism. Since collaboration defied the ingrained notion of the author as the solitary producer of his or her work, critics and readers have time and again attempted to “parse” the collaboration by dissecting the co-authored work into its constituent halves, a treatment that the Fields too failed to escape.