Carolyn Dever. Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diaries of Michael Field

Abstract

Michael Field, the pseudonymous authorial persona of Katharine Bradley and her niece, lover, and life partner Edith Cooper (they characterized themselves as ‘closer married’ that Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning), was the author of one of the most expansive and, until recently, neglected oeuvres in fin de siècle literature. Their published output included 27 verse dramas, eight volumes of lyric poetry, and a handful of short prose pieces. But arguably their greatest achievement was Works and Days, a 28-volume, 9500-page diary, which primarily covers the years 1888 until Bradley’s death in 1914 (Cooper predeceased her by nine months in 1913). Yet the diary has remained largely inaccessible to most readers. While Bradley and Cooper’s literary executor Thomas Sturge Moore (alongside his son) edited a single volume of selected entries in 1933, and a small selection edited by Ivor Treby was published in 2006, viewing the diary in all its messy magnificence required a visit to the British Library’s Manuscripts Reading Room (or from 2003 access to a microfilm copy and the patience of a saint). Yet from around 2015 onwards, the diaries have been digitized and are in the process of being transcribed, saving the neophyte reader the perils and pleasures of familiarizing themselves with Bradley and Cooper’s orthography. The volumes are a treasure trove: Michael Field encountered just about every important figure in fin de siècle literary London and penned vivid (and often amusingly virulent) pen sketches of Robert Browning, Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Berenson, among many others. More importantly, Bradley and Cooper wrote beautifully about their love for one another, their creative process, their intellectual development, and the tragedy and beauty that dominated their lives. Despite its richness and value, the diary has yet to receive sustained critical analysis, until now.