Michael Field: Decadent Moderns

Abstract

This important collection of essays marks a defining moment in Michael Field studies. It constitutes a declaration that Michael Field, pseudonym of the aunt and niece, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, collaborators and incestuous lovers, is now firmly established as a major poet. A sign of this is the research depth, adventurous thinking and precision of the work here – Catherine Maxwell, for instance, meticulously names each of the specific species of roses beloved of the pair, and quotes Bradley’s horticultural learning, ‘the presence on our desk of Marshall Niel roses, with snow-green shadows’. Strikingly, all these essays open up in detail for the first time the many affiliations and formations to which Field belonged, going far beyond the known friendships with Pater, Wilde and Berenson, and in the process moving to texts well outside the customarily read works. Kate Thomas reminds us of Edward Carpenter’s pullulating plant world and its affinity with Field’s green sexual aesthetic of vegetable and plant life (‘Vegetable Love: Michael Field’s Queer Ecology’). Havelock Ellis and Field’s intense engagement, charged with the predicament of rape by a god, with the forgotten poet, Thomas Ashe, is another affiliation explored by Margaret D. Stetz (‘ “As She Feels a GodWithin”: Michael Field and Inspiration’). Ana Vadillo points to Field’s association with the book artist, Joseph Zaelnsdorf, and Alexander Stuart Murray, Keeper of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum (‘Sculpture, Poetics, Marble Books: Casting Michael Field’). In her ‘Sister Arts: Michael Field and Mary Costelloe’, Sarah Parker explores Field’s relationship with Berenson’s mistress, rather than with the art critic himself, and points to further significant female friendships – Vernon Lee, Maud Cruttwell, Alice Trusted. Joseph Bristow names not only Wilde but Nietzsche (‘Michael Field’s “Unwomanly Audacities”: Attila, My Attila, Sexual Modernity, and the London Stage’), while Catherine Maxwell reminds us of the friendship with another queer partnership, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. The last five essays venture into Field’s Catholicism, ground rarely and Michael Field: Decadent Moderns, ed. Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019, £72.00 hardback, ISBN 9780821424018