"‘Michael Field’ (1884–1914) was the pseudonym of two women, the
aunt and niece Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who lived and
wrote together as lovers. The large oeuvre contains poems, dramas
and a vast diary. Marion Thain recounts the development of a
fascinating and idiosyncratic poetic persona that, she argues, itself
became a self-reflexive study in aestheticism. The constructed life
and work of ‘Michael Field’ is used here to deepen and complicate
our understanding of many of the most distinctive aesthetic debates
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; a process unified
by the recurring engagement with theories of time and history that
structures this book. This analysis of poetry, aestheticism and the fin
de sie`cle, through the performance of ‘Michael Field’, has implications
that reach far beyond an understanding of one poet’s work.
"
