Michael Field’s Shared Sublime and Post-Romantic Transcendence

Abstract

Collaborating poets Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, writing under the pseudonym Michael Field, challenge the solipsistic tradition of the Romantic sublime to assert a more egalitarian and communal understanding of ecstatic pleasure. This article argues that their creative and erotic partnership establishes shared experience as a central feature of sublimity and, in so doing, invites readers to reimagine the terms of transcendence in late-Victorian literature and culture.