“Let no
man think he can put asunder what God has joined”. So wrote the poet Katharine
Bradley in a letter of 1886. She was explaining her relationship with her niece
Edith Cooper, using the words of the Christian marriage ceremony to affirm
their lifelong partnership.
In an
era in which Queen Victoria is (erroneously) rumoured to have dismissed
lesbianism as an impossibility, these two women declared themselves “closer
married” even than Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning – the
ultimate literary power couple – because, as Bradley explained: “those two
poets, man and wife, wrote alone”. Rather than writing separately, Bradley and
Cooper decided to create their works as one.
They
invented a whole new persona to bind them together. His name was “Michael
Field”. Writing together through this male voice, Bradley and Cooper forged a
collaboration that was both romantic and creative. Being Field allowed them to
express things that, in Bradley’s words “the world will not tolerate from a
woman’s lips”. As Field, they published hundreds of poems, many of them
strikingly erotic. As they wrote defiantly in one poem:
My Love and I took hands and
swore,
Against
the world, to be
Poets
and lovers evermore.
Bradley
and Cooper certainly had reason to feel that the world was against them. Their
early works were enthusiastically received: one reviewer suggested that Field
be nominated for poet laureate. But once word got around that this promising
writer was two women, rather than one man, their reception took a decidedly
dismissive turn – precisely as they had feared.
Nonetheless,
the women still had the support of their friends, many of whom were part of the
late-19th-century aesthetic movement. Aestheticism promoted an “art for art’s sake”
philosophy, celebrating beauty as free of moral or utilitarian considerations.
Aesthetic friends included Oscar Wilde, the art critic Bernard Berenson, and
the artists and designers Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, themselves a
committed same-sex couple.
Ricketts
and Shannon created several beautiful volumes for Bradley and Cooper, using
fine paper and stunningly intricate cover designs. Field’s works never sold in
huge numbers, but they attracted an elite set of influential admirers and
Bradley and Cooper became minor celebrities in the fin-de-siècle literary
world.
One of
their earliest volumes, Long Ago (1889) took inspiration from Sappho of Lesbos
– the most celebrated woman poet of Ancient Greece and the origin of the term
“lesbian”. Sappho’s poems, which only survive in fragments, address love lyrics
to both male and female loved ones. Bradley and Cooper use these fragments as
suggestive catalysts for their own poems, celebrating female beauty and
intimacy. For example, the fragment “They plaited garlands in their time”
becomes a fully-fledged vision of Sapphic community:
They plaited garlands in their
time;
They
knew the joy of youth’s sweet prime,
Quick
breath and rapture:
Theirs
was the violet-weaving bliss,
And
theirs the white, wreathed brow to kiss,
Kiss,
and recapture.
Both
women were deeply interested in classical literature, having studied Latin and
Greek at Newnham College and University College, Bristol. The Hellenic world
provided them with an example of a society in which homoerotic love was
accepted and honoured. But their sexuality (including the incestuous dimension
of their partnership) never appeared to trouble them much, as they proudly
proclaimed their fellowship throughout their life and works.
Bradley
and Cooper were true “Renaissance women”. Every new volume became an exciting
new research project into which they threw themselves with gusto. No arena was
off limits and their interests stretched from European art, to perfume,
ecology, vegetarianism, theology and philosophy. The scope of their artistic
ambition is captured in more than 20 verse dramas, as well as lyric poetry.
They believed unshakably in their own genius, despite critical indifference and
occasional mockery.
Perhaps
their strangest volume is Whym Chow: Flame of Love, a book of poems dedicated
to their beloved dog. They acquired this somewhat domineering chow in 1897 and
he quickly became the centre of their world. Following his unexpected early
death in 1906, the women were so devastated that they converted to Roman
Catholicism, in the hopes that they would be reunited with him in heaven.
Their
last volumes, Mystic Trees (1913) and Poems of Adoration (1914), contained
Catholic poems that combined their earlier pagan passion with a new devotion to
the Virgin Mary. Their faith offered comfort when Cooper was diagnosed with
cancer in 1911. She died in 1913, with Bradley following shortly after in 1914.
Michael
Field was neglected for the bulk of the 20th century. But, in recent years,
interest in their collaboration has grown. This raises the question: what can
Bradley and Cooper teach us today? Their joint diaries have recently become
available online, covering a 26-year period from 1888 to 1914.
These
offer a unique insight into the ups and downs of lifelong same-sex partnership
in all its complexity. Like Anne Lister’s diaries, recently dramatised as
Gentleman Jack, Bradley and Cooper’s diary reveals them – potential queer icons
that they were – to be deeply flawed: snobbish, over-sensitive, dismissive of
women and the working classes.
Poets
and lovers: the two women who were Michael Field. By Sarah Parker. The Conversation, January 31, 2020.
In 1884,
a new issue of The Spectator, a prominent British magazine that had previously
panned Charles Dickens's Bleak House, heralded the arrival of a new poet and
playwright. The Spectator was delivered by a breathless horseman to the elite
and bohemian artistic circles of Victorian England as soon as it was available.
It proclaimed that Michael Field had "the ring of a new voice, which is
likely to be heard far and wide among the English-speaking people." Field
saved that glowing review of Fair Rosamund, as well as every other bulletin
heralding the six-shilling verse play's triumphant arrival in 1884.
Critics
proclaimed Michael Field the next Shakespeare — without any idea of who Michael
Field was. The mystery fed his ego, and there was no greater sustenance than an
unexpected letter from Robert Browning. The era's preeminent writer flattered
and praised Field in earnest, but not without an agenda. He was the only one
who had the gumption to ask Michael Field directly about his identity. The rest
of London's artistic circles seemed content to speculate among themselves, but
not Browning, who procured the debut playwright's address.
But
could Field trust Browning with his true self? Yes, Browning promised by post.
The prospect of intimacy with a literary titan like Browning was intoxicating
to Field and outweighed the obvious risk of telling a stranger his secret. And
so Browning became the second person, after Field's publisher, to learn the
true identity of the new literary phenomena.
His name
wasn't Michael Field. He wasn't a man. He wasn't a woman, either. He was two
women: a pair of lovers named Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper.
The collaboration
must never be made public, Edith wrote, for it would end Michael Field's
promising career. It was not just a matter of literary secrecy, but of
reputation. If the writer's gender was discovered, "Michael" risked
total dismissal by the literary gatekeepers, the arbiters of taste who still
viewed women writers as an exception. If Michael were revealed to be two
people, it would prove disastrous. Writers who paired up to publish were
thought of as amateurs; they were not gifted enough to go it alone.
But
Browning, who knew well the obstacles facing female writers, as husband to the
poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, violated Edith and Katherine's request for
"strict secrecy." The pair learned they had been outed when the
London literary magazine The Athenaeum referred to Michael Field as
"she."
Katherine
wrote to Browning, who was no doubt the rumor monger: "We have many things
to say that the world will not tolerate from a woman's lips." George
Eliot, the legendary female author of Middlemarch, had proven that a male
pseudonym lent authority and high seriousness. And that's how Edith and
Katherine regarded themselves — as real Poets, which they spelled, always, with
a capital "P."
And yet,
few remember these vainglorious spinsters who, because of inherited wealth and
an inconsistently permissive society, were able to write and love with
unprecedented abandon. They were minor literary figures in the Victorian era,
just as Alice Mitchell, the subject of my first book, was a minor murderer in
the Victorian era, and yet they add such depth and complexity to the fin de
siècle, sapphic Zeitgeist — one that, while overlooked by mainstream
historians, seems to consist of one astonishing tale after another.
And
there's something far more to shocking to the "Michael Field" secret,
too, another part, but that came much later.
It all
began on January 12, 1862. Katherine, then fifteen, cradled Edith, her newborn
niece, in her arms. Lissie, Katherine's older sister, would recover from
Edith's birth, but after the birth of her second daughter, Amy, Lissie was
never quite right again. She was feeble and grew dependent on Katherine and
their mother, Emma, who wasn't in good health herself.
Grief
was the first literary art Katherine was determined to master. She did not turn
away when a foal was stillborn at her mother's country cottage, a terrible
experience that left an enduring impression. "I cannot bear the children
about always," she wrote in her diary. Katherine's life would soon be
motherless, and, if she could avoid it, it would always remain childless. She
seemed totally exhausted by the demands she saw placed on women with families
and knew it would surely put an end to the wanderlust and intellectual
curiosity burning inside her.
It was
not necessarily maternal feelings, then, that drew Katherine to her eldest
niece. It was just a preference, there from the beginning, obvious to everyone.
Young Edith was ambitious in her studies, mature in her behavior, and
independent, but for all her quiet charms, she was not enough to tempt
Katherine to stay in their hometown of Birmingham's "dust &
ashes." When her mother died, Katherine lit out for France.
The
recently orphaned 22-year-old simultaneously wallowed in her pain, writing,
"Oh to be at the bottom of the Seine," and embraced her first real
taste of independence, almost 300 miles away from home, in Paris. She studied
at the Collège de France and reveled in her new life. Katherine was thrilled by
new prospects in Paris and spent hours contemplating their unqualified
potential.
And yet
she was struck by overwhelming homesickness. By 1873, she was at Lissie's side
once again, living with her family. Katherine devoted herself to "teaching
the chicks" and writing poetry, but this time, she did not keep her
thoughts hidden in a personal diary.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
In 1875,
at the age of 29, Katherine became a published author. She sent a collection of
poems, The New Minnesinger, by "Arran Leigh," a pen name inspired by
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, to every man she knew. The book,
whose subjects ranged widely from primroses to Goethe, was received well enough
to encourage her to pursue writing further and to live on her own, choices that
were rare for women of the time, even if they had means.
All the
while, Katherine's favorite niece was at home, growing taller and more learned
than her aunt. By adolescence, Edith was translating Virgil and writing poetry.
We know little more about her youth, and even less about when or how her
relationship with Katherine changed.
I can
vaguely pinpoint their romance's start somewhere around 1876. That's the year
Katherine, then 30, wrote fourteen-year-old Edith a Christmas poem whose lines
suggests their relationship was in transition, from doting aunt and beloved
niece to a romantic coupling.
From
Fowl to Fowlet;
From Owl
to Owlet;
From
Loving to Lover;
From
Bard to his Brother;
From
Arran Leigh
To the Voice to Be.
From the
hand of "Own"
To the
dearest Known;
From the
Bird-All-Wise
To the
Light of his eyes;
From
Friend unto Frien
After Life shall end.
From
then on, Katharine and Edith were only "aunt" and "niece"
in letters to their family and friends. To each other, they were "my
Love" and "my Beloved," separated only by geography. Katherine,
of age and means and with the most modest of literary success under a pen name,
traveled as she pleased, while Edith, stuck at home by virtue of age and
vulnerable to illnesses common and indeterminate, waited eagerly for her
letters. Edith began writing letters as if they were diary entries, in sections
marked "later," "later at night," and "after
breakfast." In those quiet hours, she communed with Katherine as well.
"You always sleep with me in effigy — for your portrait lies under my
pillow and I kiss it."
Whether
their family knew that a niece was kissing a portrait of her aunt every night
or not, and what moved her to do so, is unclear, but the Bradley-Coopers
weren't completely in the dark, as I discovered in the archives of the Morgan
Library & Museum in New York. Not that Edith, with her weak constitution,
could have kept up with Katherine's travels, but in her most robust months, the
family may have been making efforts to keep the two women apart.
In April
of 1885, Edith wrote to Katherine, "my own loving Deare," with sorry
news, referring to herself with one of the nicknames her Aunt had bestowed on
her: "The Parents won't lend you the Pussy — they think ill would befall
the lavender fur." Katherine, a healthy, parentless adult, was free to
wander the world, but Edith, still young, prone to illness, and with two
concerned parents, was not. Katherine, in her reply, perhaps to demonstrate her
ire, refers to her sister not by their relation but by her role as gatekeeper
to Edith, writing, "Mother must have a heart of stone if after this she
Keeps you from me. What is it to me to be in the woods without my Pretty
swinging on the bough?"
By
August, Katherine was addressing her as "Sweet Wife" and "My
Pretty Spouse," and Edith seemed to rise to the title. She had turned
sixteen and was finally well enough to venture away from home. She enrolled in
classes at the University of Bristol and made a home in Stoke Bishop. It wasn't
long before Katherine began to visit, which must have seemed, to the outside
world, rather proper: a spinster aunt of means chaperoning her niece.
Intimacy
between two women — which could include kissing, or sharing a bed — was
perfectly acceptable. Women in Cambridge would "prop" each other,
meaning use each other's last names, and words like lesbian and categories like
"gay" did not yet exist in the mainstream. It was not uncommon for
same-sex literary couples, like author Willa Cather and her lifelong partner,
editor Edith Lewis, to openly live together; many other creative couples did so
without drawing too much suspicion or interest. Of course, few of these couples
were relations.
And the
truth would have been shocking — if not incomprehensible. Incest was certainly
taboo, but that taboo existed alongside counternarratives; first cousins were
marrying in the Protestant church and in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. As
London School of Economics centennial professor Adam Kuper argues, the leading
bourgeois clans' "preference for marriages within the family circle was a
crucial factor in their success."
But
Katherine and Edith were, of course, women. A union between them was
fundamentally impossible in the eyes of the church and the law. So was the idea
of a woman's committing incest, an exclusion that, in this case, allowed them
great opportunity.
Katherine
often joined Edith for lectures on the classics and philosophy, where they,
like the academy itself, favored men. They read the Elizabethan playwrights,
Gustave Flaubert, Dante Rossetti, and his sister, Christina. Considered
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's rival for best female poet of the era, Christina
Rossetti was one of the few women they read. In her "Goblin Market,"
a narrative poem, one character, Lizzie, tells her sister, Laura, to lick
juices off her body. For Katherine and Edith, Rosetti's unchaste work was a
foreshadowing of what they would do as Michael Field.
They
became suffragettes, eschewing corsets and hoop skirts for tight-clinging
frocks. They saw themselves as maenads, the female followers of Dionysus, but
what was true on the page was true in life. Katherine and Edith preferred to
read men, just as they preferred the company of men, although the feeling was
not always reciprocated. Men did not find their vernacular, which often
included casual use of archaic language, very attractive or ladylike, and the
intensity of their intimacy was off-putting.
Some
days, they drove each other mad. In 1891, Katherine wrote to a male
correspondent that "[Edith] and I have nearly killed one another with vain
and cruel reproaches over the Romuald scene. We are left with wasted eyes,
reconciled hearts, and a humorous sense of the folly of alienation."
But such
strife was the exception. Katherine and Edith's art was essential to their
love, and their love was central to their art. The arrangement, in their minds,
made them superior to even the most acclaimed literary couples — including
Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Katherine and Edith were also without
many of the same financial concerns as writers like the Brownings. Success was
integral to their ego, but not to their pocketbook, which was padded by their
family's tobacco fortune. Thus they could indulge the most romanticized
artistic process. If the family home in Bristol inhibited their love and work,
she and Edith would simply get up and go. Their works, which ultimately
numbered eight books of poetry, 27 plays, and countless journals and letters,
would always be published one way or another.
But that
was only half the battle. The women also wanted to control their persona, which
often proved difficult. Katherine took to her diary to complain about the
carelessness with which others treated their open secret, penning a
particularly seething entry following a party where the hostess had, without
warning, introduced them as Michael Field. With utter disgust, she described
how a crowd of "fashionable women" pummeled them with compliments
until she could take it no more. "I laid a master-hand on the
hostess," she recalled, and ordered her to introduce them by their Christian
names, not their professional pseudonym. There wasn't one instance during which
they were exposed that led to a waning in critical success, but they
alternately complained, just a year after their debut, about a lack of
opportunity, a lack of reviews for their work, and a lack of understanding.
Their style seemed tired, and though they sometimes considered modernizing,
they never did. Stephania, an 1892 play, was privately described as one
"only pure-minded elderly mid-Victorian virgins could have imagined."
Wait 50 years, Browning assured them, and all will change. But patience was not
their favored virtue, and, as we know now, it made no difference. "Within
a decade of Michael Field's debut, reviewers were referring to the writer as
"she," damaging their reputation and ensuring that their prestige
would dwindle, their work would get reviewed less often and favorably, and
their egos would suffer — as would, ultimately, their legacy.
The
couple left for Paris, then Milan, Florence, Verona, Bologna, Pisa, and Genoa in
search of inspiration, but their travels came to an abrupt end with Edith was
struck with scarlet fever. She spent weeks in a hospital, plagued by fever
dreams and an obsessive, "pious nurse stuffed in four layers of
stockings." Katherine raged about everything they had to offer, from the
wine they served to the hospital room she paced. Edith eventually recovered,
and both were much improved by the critical reception to Sight and Song, a
collection of poetry inspired by the oil paintings of the Italian Masters. The
Academy called it most Keatsian thing since Keats and the only thing more
romantic than a Romantic poet.
They
celebrated at a friend's home, where they fell in with Bernard Berenson, a
fashionable art historian whom they hoped to trail through exhibition halls and
galleries. Berenson, a Harvard-educated son of Jewish immigrants who toured
Europe under American patronage, had felled many in their circle, whether they
were married or otherwise engaged, but his hold on Edith was as unexpected as it
was substantial. She seemed to take a step, at least in their diary, away from
Katherine and toward Berenson, writing "he and I" rather than
"we and him."
Berenson
was 25 to Edith's 28, and he threatened everything that was Michael Field.
"O Henry, Henry, my boy, let us cleave to art," Katherine wrote in
their diary, to which Edith answered, "Let us not fear." Despite his
searing intellectual and androgynous charms, Berenson could never compare with
what Edith had with Katherine. It was the only love she had ever known, and she
was not so foolish as to believe it could be easily replicated — which was, in
its own bizarre way, correct. That they were able to sustain a same-sex
relationship for decades, let alone an incestuous one, was indeed unlikely, and
certainly, had it been discovered, it would have been deemed perverse and
treated as such. "We kiss & are complete," Edith wrote of
Katherine, admiring the "radiance from her face," but she just couldn't
seem to let the idea of Berenson go. Katherine certainly expressed pointed
resentment: "I have seen my fertile land become a desert through
him."
But for
the most part, she seemed to take Edith's feelings in stride, and they did
little to weaken her own. Once, when she was due in London to see a play,
Katherine went to kiss Edith, whose delicate features were framed by a fox
collar. Katherine was so moved by her beautiful love, she decided she could not
leave. They sometimes quarreled, as couples do, and the solution was a walk, a
holiday or a trip, and sometimes gifts, including a red silk bodice Katherine
bought Edith in the city. Edith eventually gave up her obsession, for
Katherine's sake, and Berenson, easily distracted, didn't put up a fight.
Katherine
and Edith passed for spinsters when the 1901 Census came calling. Though they
had their ups and downs with Oscar Wilde — "There is no charm in his
elephantine body tightly stuffed into his clothes," Edith once wrote after
he barely acknowledged them at a party — they also thought of him when they
passed as acceptable members of society. Women could live together and rouse
little suspicion, but Wilde had sued the marquess of Queensbury for libel over
a calling card that said "For Oscar Wilde posing Sodomite [sic]." At
the trial, Wilde's own lawyer asked him about suggestive letters he had
written, which he claimed were works of art.
Queensbury
was acquitted, but Wilde was soon back in court, accused of sodomy and gross
indecency. Michael Field's poems and plays — Katherine and Edith's art — as
well as their letters and diaries, were rife with the kind of eroticism that
got Wilde sentenced, in 1895, to two years' hard labor. This fate was unlikely
for a woman, but other forms of imprisonment, like asylums, were within the
realm of possibility.
Living
relatively undetected was a priority, but Katherine and Edith seemed more
concerned with the luxury of privacy than the safety of it. They were overjoyed
when Edith's sister Amy, at 34, was finally married at the local church, in no
small part because it ensured there was little chance they would be saddled
with a third wheel; their family was prone to illness, and she was the only
immediate living relation left. They played the role well for Amy, receiving wedding
guests after the Catholic ceremony, gifting the newlyweds an antique silver
teapot, and joyously seeing their "quiet little bride," their last
obligation, off. Now their days were their own, to be spent entertaining and
writing, even though critics had taken to ignoring their works.
For the
eight years that followed, they were content with each other and Whym, a dog
they considered a "symbol of our perfect union." Whym was not long
for such weighty passion, and when he died, they could find no solace in words
or friends. He had been a physical communion of their love for each other,
which they saw, essentially, as Christ-like, describing his "wondrous
fur" as offering a "loved confessional." To fill the void he
left behind, they turned to an obvious (given their background) but unlikely
(given everything else) substitute: the Catholic church.
It was
considered in vogue for Victorian women artists to turn to Catholicism, and it
was all the more popular, through the twentieth century, for lesbians to
convert, including Radclyffe Hall, who wrote The Well of Loneliness, a radical
lesbian novel, and Gertrude Stein's partner, Alice B. Toklas. The church
offered a family, showmanship, and formality, and even a woman, the Virgin
Mary, to whom they could (chastely) devote themselves.
Edith
was baptized in April of 1907, and Katherine followed in May. (Not to be left
out, Amy, Edith's sister, also converted from Dublin.) They may have continued
their "secret sins," as Edith called them, but otherwise, they seemed
wholly given over to the church. Instead of writing, they spent their days
agonizing over Catholic doctrine. Their holidays were no longer spent at the
beach but at religious retreats, and though they despised nuns, as they did any
group of women, they became Dominican tertiaries in 1910.
In 1911,
at 49, Edith was diagnosed with cancer. She rose to the occasion, blaming her
"great, flagrant sinning" for her disease. "Finally,"
biographer Emma Donoghue wrote, "a tragedy worthy of [Edith's]
talents." The couple got an Elkhound dog with worms and other ailments,
and slept together on the floor. Katherine had once read Wordsworth to her
ailing sister; now she read it to that sister's ailing daughter.
"When
the pain is very bad, Michael takes me in her arms, & the vital warmth of
her being is of such power the pain goes to sleep," wrote Edith. She
refused morphine, opting instead for Trypsin, which extended her life but did
not save her from the unpleasantness of dying. Still, she was able to enjoy a
fickle new car, and on New Year's Eve in 1912, she wrote twenty nearly
inscrutable pages summarizing the year. Katherine's wretchedness is clearly expressed
in poetry.
OH. WHAT
CAN DEATH HAVE TO DO.
WITH A CURVE THAT IS DRAWN SO FINE
WITH A CURVE THAT IS DRAWN AS TRUE
AS THE MOUNTAIN'S CRESCENT LINE?...
LET ME BE HID WHERE THE DUST FALLS FINE!
Edith's
last words, on December 13, 1913, were "Not yet, not yet." She did
not know that Katherine had been diagnosed with breast cancer earlier in the
year. As if on cue, her lifelong partner began to hemorrhage at Edith's
funeral. Edith was gone, but Katherine continued to write to her. She told her that
the woman hired to nurse her was "not a pretty little nun, Hennie."
Convinced that she was present, Katherine asked Edith to "show me how you
love me now."
Tommy Sturge Moore
They had
hoped the British Library would preserve their papers and tasked Tommy Sturge
Moore, whom Yeats described as "one of the most exquisite poets writing in
England," as their executor, with the task of placing them there. Moore
succeeded, but neither he, nor the British Library, saved Michael Fields from
relative literary obscurity. The reason is as familiar to us as it was to
Katherine and Edith: men found these women, these spinsters, these
collaborators, easy to forget. They became footnotes in books on Oscar Wilde
and Robert Browning and other Great Literary Men, mere afterthoughts in
liberal-arts classes on same-sex literary couples during the Victorian era.
This is
not their fault, nor a judgment of their work. Women writers have proven
particularly easy to consign to oblivion, whether or not the quality of their
work merited it. Katherine and Edith may not have produced plays and poems that
appeal to modern audiences, but their story might. Donoghue's fine attempt to
resurrect the pair in 1998 didn't quite take, but as the number of women
scholars continues to grow, so do Michael Field's chances.
In her
last year, Katherine was focused on leaving their literary house in good order,
publishing Edith's early works and a limited edition of their collaboration.
She quarreled with Berenson, who was upset to learn that Michael Field's
executor was his sworn enemy and demanded authority over any of their journal
entries that mentioned him. (Instead, he was simply excluded from publication,
which meant scholars tended to exclude him, too, convenient for those
uninterested in their relationships with men.)
But as
the year progressed, Katherine grew tired. She put down her pen and spent her
final days in a cottage in Staffordshire, listening to news of the First World
War. When she had enough strength, she was wheeled to Mass. That was the plan
on September 26, 1914, when Katherine collapsed while being readied for church by
a nurse, her body sinking to the ground while her soul drifted off to find
Edith's.
The
Forgotten, Scandalous Lesbian Writing Duo of the Victorian Era. By Alexis
Coe. Lenny, February 2, 2018.
Oscar Wilde on his deathbed
“My
wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has to
go.”
Oscar
Wilde on his deathbed, 1900.
“Ugly”
is not a word easily found in connection with the poet “Michael Field”, the
joint pen name of Katharine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper. The women meant
everything to each other. They were aunt and niece, married in art, lovers
living and writing in fellowship. As aesthetes they consciously dedicated their
life to “Art” and insisted on living surrounded by beautiful things. Pater’s
description of the archetypical aesthetic critic as someone possessing “a
certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of
beautiful objects” aptly defines Bradley’s and Cooper’s aesthetic sensibilities.
In a loving account of the poets, the painter William Rothenstein tells us that
the women were “endowed with an ecstatic sense of beauty.” “With so much beauty
to occupy them”, he notes, “they had not time for, and no patience with, the
meaner objects which too many men and women pursue.” But “ugly”, their friend Charles Ricketts also
tells us, was the house where Bradley and Cooper became “Michael Field”: “Their
first book Callirrhoë was written in an ugly modern villa in a provincial
town.” Callirrhoë, published in 1884 by George Bell and Sons, made the name of
Michael Field famous. The verse drama was declared to be the work of “poetic
genius” by Robert Browning. But the women would have agreed with Ricketts.
Bourgeois and middle-class, not bohemian or High Art, was their home in Stoke
Bishop, Bristol, where the women lived between 1879 and 1888, and where they
wrote in secret Callirrhoë. Bradley chose this home for the family (which
included Cooper’s parents, James and Edith Emma Cooper, as well as Cooper’s
sister, Amy) for two reasons: one to be close to University College, Bristol
where the women enrolled as students in 1879 and two, it was a house that could
accommodate well and comfortably Edith’s mother (Bradley’s sister), an invalid.
In fact,
Bradley and Cooper keenly embraced the House Beautiful movement and were
passionately interested in the decorative arts. The word “ugly” resonates so
strongly in Ricketts’ sentence precisely because Michael Field, like Ricketts,
believed in the transformative effect of home décor in everyday life. William
Morris’s 1882 pivotal discussion of art in the home outlines quite precisely
Bradley and Cooper’s vision of decorative arts: “Not only is it possible to
make the matters needful to our daily life works of art, but there is something
wrong in the civilization that does not do this: if our houses, our clothes,
our household furniture and utensils are not works of art”, he writes, “they are
either wretched makeshifts or, what is worse, degrading shams of better
things.” Bradley and Cooper never
published on home decoration, but an examination of their diaries, letters and
photographs reveals their complete identification with the House Beautiful
movement. They agreed with Ruskin, “beautiful art can only be produced by
people who have beautiful things about them,” and they set about to create a
home that could house their own artistry and creativity. As Bradley put it in
their diary, Works and Days: “To-day’s dreams & desires—the tongs with wh.
the angel makes living coals of our lips to-day—these are the things to be
expressed in our walls, in our furniture, in our dress.” This expressive,
living, aestheticism where the self is located in and expressed through the
aesthetic interior is at the core of this essay.
In what
follows I focus on how Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper inhabited
aestheticism in their life as Michael Field. I suggest that Michael Field’s
theory and practice of the aesthetic interior was deeply indebted to male
aesthetes. John Ruskin, William Morris, Walter Pater, Bernard Berenson and
Charles Ricketts all were, at different stages, key influences in Michael
Field’s styling of their homes. But I will also argue here that Michael Field’s
use of decorative arts created homes embedded in history: the history of art,
aesthetics, but most crucially their own. I argue that their homes were not
aesthetic just for art’s sake but truly expressive of their identity as
aesthetes. They strove to create aesthetic interiors that expressed them, their
own history, their own dreams and desires. As Bradley so eloquently noted: “It
is we who bring the harmonies not time. An uninhabited room would remain crude
whatever happened to the colours.” I begin by examining Bradley and Cooper’s
love of furniture and artistic houses in the 1880s, when they were still living
in that “ugly” villa in Stoke Bishop. I then move on to discuss their first
beautiful house, Durdans (Reigate), where the poets lived between 1891 and
1899. In the third part of this essay I look into their second and final home
at 1 Paragon, Richmond, where the women lived until 1914.
Bradley
and Cooper’s engagement with aestheticism encompassed all aspects of their
lives, from writing and book designing to clothes and, more to the point of
this paper, home decoration. In the early 1880s, just as they were becoming the
aesthetic poet Michael Field, the women began to articulate the ways in which
the artist experienced the aesthetic through the personal space of the home.
Thus, in an important 1880 letter to Bradley (who was then visiting Italy),
Cooper explains that she could not deprive herself “of the firm conviction
that, since, as Wordsworth sings “The eye cannot choose but see”, beautiful
objects, noble in their forms, and pure in their colour, ought to be given for
food.” Quoting Wordsworth but following William Morris, Cooper went on to associate
the artistic temperament with aestheticism and the house beautiful movement:
“Would . . . that Art might be honoured in the houses of those who live plainly
and think highly !”
As apostles
of the beautiful, they followed the late-Victorian craze for collecting blue
china, rare tapestries and antique objects—the signs and symbols of an
aesthetic home. An 1880 letter by Cooper
to her cousin Fanny shows their excitement for High Art, aesthetic homes and
for the most important symbol of the aesthete, the sunflower:
I think we have found real friends in a
delightful Church family—near neighbours, who live in a most High Art house,
& are most refined & kindly people. . . . It was at their house that we
met Miss Scott, the head of the g[rea]t High Art shop in Old Bond St., from
whom we got the glorious sunflowers that will bloom in yellow beauty out of our
cool, grey blue walls.
They
also learned much about the influence of “High Art” homes by visiting aesthetic
houses and studios (by the 1870s and 80s a new craze among aesthetes). One of
the thinkers behind the Aesthetic Movement was John Ruskin, his
anti-industrial, anti-materialistic stand the impulse behind William Morris’s
own development as art designer. Like Oscar Wilde, Bradley had been a member of
Ruskin’s utopian road-building project “The Guild of St. George”. Though they
never met, she corresponded with him for five years (1875-1880). Bradley, like
Morris and Wilde, rejected Ruskin’s moral approach to aestheticism (it was her
rejection of theism that caused their correspondence to end), but his teachings
on art and aesthetics deeply influenced the women. As a devotee she visited his
home in 1882. She described this “memorable”, “precious” visit (her own words)
in a long detailed letter to Cooper. Entering the house she found herself at
the entrance hall “facing the Master’s Copy of Botticelli’s Zipphorah, and 2
long [Burne-]Jones figures.” “The hall is low, the walls pale buff: I like [it]
thus at the threshold the salutation of Art.” Bradley carefully noted the
colours of the rooms: the blue curtain in the drawing room, the soft grey walls
of the dining room, the milky blue green colour of the furniture and draperies,
the rich shades of red in the Turkey carpet. Entering the drawing room, she
admired Burne-Jones’ painting Fair Rosamund (incidentally the title of Michael
Field’s second play, published also in 1884 in the same volume as Callirrhoë)
and Turner’s Pass of the Splügen. She admired the windows, designed by Ruskin himself
in the Gothic style. She thought the wallpaper in his study, “a copy of a bit
of a Cardinal’s sleeve in an old picture”, was a “failure” (“looks very much
like the pattern of a large flowery dressing gown”). She was surprised to see
that the rooms displayed works of art as well as family portraits (“of the
Master’s father when young” and “of the Master when a child”). She was
disappointed by his study: “it is not beautiful—nor suggestive of happy
work—too crow[d]ed and scientific looking piled with Cabinets and
book-Cases—except in the wondrous corner, where at a little round table the
Master works by the window.” The room in the house that most impressed Bradley
was Ruskin’s bedroom:
There is
the lesson of Brantwood. Monastic simplicity,—the one thing needful for the
highest attainable art. A small iron bedstead and—eleven Turners on the walls.
That one glance will shame me all my life, when I desire artistic luxury. And
the room itself is very small, not larger I think that the Fowl’s [i.e. Bradley
herself].
Against
the heavy decoration styled by the Victorian middle-class, Bradley loved
Ruskin’s minimalism and artistic luxury. We shall see how Ruskin’s décor
influenced Bradley and Cooper’s first “House Beautiful”, Durdans, but this
visit was memorable for another reason too. What is surprising about the letter
is that her description of Ruskin’s home is full of affective words symbolic of
the power she attached to Ruskin, because indeed, she could truly read the man
more authentically through his home: the choice of paintings, colours, the lack
of superfluous items, the simple bed, his library (including authors he advised
others not to read, i.e. Harriet Martineau), even his seal with the motto
“To-day”. She ended the letter giving the following advice to Cooper: “Think
much of all I tell you—it is full of significance.”
It is
clear that Ruskin’s home made Bradley rethink her views on “High Art” homes. A
week later, she went on a visit to Dean Prior Vicarage (Bluckfastleigh), in whose
churchyard the Elizabethan poet Robert Herrick (an important influence on
Michael Field’s Elizabethan verse dramas) was buried. Bradley wrote to Cooper
thus:
The exquisite shape of the wide low rooms
makes me long to have the P. [i.e. Cooper] here to decorate the house
aesthetically. I am only just learning how important the shape of rooms is ;—it
impresses us like the figure of women. The light, or complexion of these rooms,
is most soberly delicate ; hitherto we have only thought of draperies [, ]
furniture and carpets, and these are simply the salient features and tresses of
the chamber. The light and form are the things of most potent though
unobtrusive influence on the senses. Above all things the rooms should be low.
In the face of the “grand old heavens” a high room is an insolence. What we
seek is a shelter from the storm—no ephemeral imitation of the ancient
Babylonian pride.
Now and
again there are hints in the diary that Cooper led the way in the decoration of
their homes, though manuscript materials seem to suggest a more equal footing.
But what interests me about this letter is Bradley’s emphasis on the house
itself. By giving importance to the shape and form of a room she is beginning
to articulate the sensorial influence of the house as an art object in its own
right. “It impresses us like the figure of women”, she writes. This is a more
complex approach to aesthetic interiors. This word “impresses” cannot but evoke
Walter Pater’s “Preface” to The Renaissance, where he argued that the only way
to “‘see the object as in itself it really is’ . . . is to know one’s own
impression” of it. Bradley’s definition
of the home (“what we seek is a shelter from the storm”) is moreover heavily
indebted to Walter Pater, who famously theorised the House Beautiful as place
where “the creative minds of all generations—the artists and those who have
treated life in the spirit of art—are always building together, for the refreshment
of the human spirit”. But, if the whole passage is deep in Pater, the
feminisation and sensorial reconfiguration of that space, conceptualised as
“the figure of women”, is suggestive of something else. At a time when the two
women were still writing in secret, and Cooper and Bradley were more and more
attached to each other, against their family’s wishes, the home as a place of
and for art was a secret reality as well as a dream and a desire. In an
important essay on homosexuality and aesthetic interiors, Michael Hatt has
argued that “interiors were not closets, that is, they were not spaces where a
true homosexual self resided apart form the world”. Instead, he notes,
interiors were “attempts to create spaces where private desire and public self
were integrated, where all one’s experience could be invoked and unified.” This
unification of art, desire and selfhood is what they tried to create when they
moved to Durdans, their first House Beautiful.
Michael
Field moved from Bristol to Reigate, a residential district 23 miles away from
London, in 1888. They settled first at Blackboro Lodge but they did not much
like the house.22 It was “anything but ideal. I call it almost ugly outside,
& it is on the unquiet highway, & rather far from the beauty of
Reigate.” Though ugly, it was comfortable and they tried to make it pretty:
“indeed one little bramble-chamber (papered with a Morris design of the leaves,
fruit & flowers in terra cotta & hung with bright indigo) is
beautiful”, wrote Edith Cooper. The women made of this room their retreat. “At
Morris & Co.’s,” Cooper writes, “we got brass candles for our city of
refuge, our “Zoar”, the little Blue-Room.” It was in this chamber, the Bramble
Room, where Michael Field began what was to be one of their most important
literary achievements, their diary Works and Days.They finally moved to Durdans
on 3 March 1891 and inaugurated the new place by reading lines from Beaumont
and Fletcher, the two Elizabethan dramatists who, like Bradley and Cooper,
wrote as one poet:
P. &
I drive down to Durdans in a cab full to the brim of treasures. With one hand I
clutch an Etruscan pot, with the other I hug my terrier. We pace the warm,
empty rooms. We sit in the stalls of our unshelved bookcase. Edith reads to me,
as first lyric, (for we have brought [to] town our choicest volumes) “I lean learn
ye ladies that are coy.”
Elizabeth
Aslin has noted that in the aesthetic movement the influence of William Morris
and that of John Ruskin “were all important, though at the outset Morris’s
influence was by example rather than by precept.” This was to a certain extent the case with
Michael Field. Ruskinians in their understanding of craftsmanship, labour and
home décor, their house was nonetheless a testament to William Morris’s radical
approach to design. The first thing Michael Field bought for Durdans was, not
surprisingly, the wall paper: “A marvellous day”, Cooper writes in their diary,
“[t]he gay Morris papers were unpacked at “Durdans”—jocund designs with which a
poet must be gay.” Many of the items for Durdans came from Morris & Co.’s,
including their couch. During 1891, their love for Morris’s work was unbound.
The poets visited his shop on numerous occasions to buy or simply to admire
Morris’s artwork. “‘At Morris’ we order our Brussels Carpet to be woven—yellow
mix on clouded cream & are bordered with blue in love with lavender, seen
through green stems with a fleck of rare pink for a bloom.” They conceived their study as a place where
their art would be in intimate dialogue with other arts: “It is weaving Act III
of Otho even as Morris is weaving our carpet, ” they wrote as they were
finalising their play. Like Morris, they believed that Art began at home. Only
antiques (Etruscan potteries, Jacobean brasses and furniture for the study) and
art objects could create the kind of home their art could grow out of. Their
lavender settee was especially designed for them by Herbert Horne: “Horne
taught us the meaning of his designs for our settee. It is to be in dark
mahogany, cushioned & canopied in the fore-ordained lavender. Horne, who
always simplifies elements in his decoration, insists on lavender velvet
curtains for our book-case.”These objects created a sensorial environment pregnant
with art, love and beauty. “An Invitation” [“Come and sing, my room is south”],
a poem which is the poet’s invitation to “his” lady to come to her room so that
they can sing together, was written by Bradley just before moving to Durdans.
Published in 1893 in Underneath the Bough, the poem shows the ways in which
they saw the personal (and erotical) and the aesthetical embedded in their new
home:
There’s
a lavender settee,
Cushioned
for my sweet and me ;
Ah, what
secrets will there be
For
love-telling,
When her
head leans on my knee !
One the
most prized possessions of the women was their cream bookshelf. It reflected
Michael Field the aesthete while also signalling Michael Field, the writer and
poet. Decorated with blue china and other kinds of aesthetic objects, it also
held “their Bacchic library”, which included among others the works of Keats,
François Villon, Pierre de Ronsard, Angelo Poliziano, Lorenzo di Medici,
Anacreon and Shakespeare, and of course Michael Field. They saw these authors
as representatives of the Dionysian spirit, which was absolutely central both
to their lives and works (particularly noticeable in Greek works such as
Callirrhoë, which discusses the origin of the adoration of the god Dionysus, or
the erotic lyrics of Long Ago [1889]). For Michael Field, being an aesthete
meant one had to be a devotee of Dionysus, it meant to be a faun (they thought
of themselves as such). It was a temperament that combined the appreciation of
classic works of art with a more romantic and ecstatic sense of beauty. And
this Dionysian spirit was not just present in the Study (see figure 1): they
erected a Bacchic altar in the garden and the women often celebrated good news
by dancing around it like Satyrs.
They noted
with delight the impression the Study had made on the connoisseur and art
critic Bernard Berenson: “Bernie admires the study—save for the lavender
curtains—which he desires to be olive-green. He thinks it a delightful
working-room. His experience of Italian villas, white & sunlit, makes him
an admirer of the house—this beautiful house.” The bookshelf and art objects can
be seen in this photograph, taken in 1899 just before they were about to leave
for Richmond. The Study (as well as Cooper’s and Bradley’s bedrooms) were
decorated with photographs of art works. The choice of photographs reveals
Bernard Berenson’s influence on Michael Field. Under the influence of Berenson,
with whom Edith Cooper was passionately in love, the women became keen
collectors of art photographs. In some ways, their walls were what André
Malraux would call later in the twentieth century, a musée imaginaire, a deeply
subjective museum, created out of large black and white photographic
reproductions of the works of arts they loved. Up to 1893 the wall in the Study
expressed the teachings of Ruskin (they had photographs of Pre-Raphaelite works
and Turners) even though unlike Ruskin’s “crowded” space, theirs was truly more
harmonious and less cluttered. But after the publication of Underneath the
Bough (1893), which met with adverse reviews and criticism from Berenson,
Michael Field went through a poetic crisis, which resulted in a re-decoration
of the Study:
The dear study is on the eve of spring
cleaning. This morning the battle of the modern raged. The past was repulsed
with great slaughter. Every Millet, every Turner has been banished from study
& blue-room. Italian art alone remains. This new god’s single command—Be
Contemporaneous is harder to keep than all the ten old commandments. Our eyes
no longer desire the Turners, our heads testify against them, yet the pain of
parting from them is keen. Memory is a [?]harpy—pluck her roots & she
bleeds.
To-day’s
dreams & desires—the tongs with wh. the angel makes living coals of our
lips to-day—these are the things to be expressed on our walls, in our furniture
[,] in our dress.
Getting
rid of the Turners (which Bradley had so much admired in Ruskin’s home) meant
disavowing past aesthetics. They felt they needed to re-connect with the
vitality of the contemporaneous, with “to-day’s dreams and desires”. They left
all the Italian paintings, some of which had been discussed by Bernard Berenson
in his The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, some they had seen in their travels
around England and Europe, some they themselves had poeticised in their 1892
volume of poems Sight and Song, a book which aimed to “translate into verse
what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves.” The
book became a manifesto of visual poetics in a post-Pre-Raphaelite age offering
a new model of visuality where gender played an important part. By placing thus
these pictures on the wall, they were bringing back to their home their own
experiences of seeing these paintings as well as externalising their own dreams
and desires, painful though these were (considering they had seen these
paintings with Bernard Berenson at the time when Cooper realised he was in love
with another woman, Mary Costelloe). Botticelli’s Spring dominates the wall
(the women in fact often referred to the Study as their “Botticelli Room”). To
the left of Spring was Titian’s Fête Champêtre and photographs of the poets.
But on the wall one can also see more personal photographs and objects. The
mirror was a present from Cooper and Bradley to Amy (Cooper’s sister). To the
right of Titian’s is the 1889 photograph by Eveleen Myeers (née Tenant) of
their beloved Robert Browning. Over the fireplace, there is a portrait of
Cooper’s mother. Displayed on the table is William Rothenstein’s 1897 drawing
of Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. These photographs and paintings speak
again of Michael Field’s conception of their house beautiful as a place where
the history of art and aesthetics is conceived through the eyes and the life of
the poet Michael Field, thus creating a much more personal, unique history of
aestheticism and of their own aesthetic lives. Indeed, as Bradley had noted:
“It is we who bring the harmonies, not time.”
On their
walls Berenson’s history of aesthetics competed with Michael Field’s aesthetic
and personal history. Charles Ricketts, however, felt that the house spoke of
Walter Pater:
The place spoke of a love of books, art,
travel and flowers. I noticed on one of the tables one of those early paper
covered editions in which Nietzsche first appeared ; otherwise, the general
atmosphere was that crystalized by Walter Pater, a survival of the less
flamboyant phase of the Aesthetic movement.
Bradley
and Cooper never visited Walter Pater’s aesthetic home in Oxford, but they did
visit him in London. Curiously they left no description of his London home,
even though their diary is full of descriptions of other aesthetic homes: “it
was his writings that they had ‘crystalized’ in their home.” In his “Postcript”
to Appreciations with an Essay on Style Pater defined the term “House
Beautiful” as the place where the classic and romantic spirit meet: It is that
“which the creative minds of all generation—the artists and those who have
treated life in the spirit of art—are always building together, for the refreshment
of the human spirit.” Wolfgang Iser has argued that Pater’s “‘House Beautiful’
is conceived as an almost total identification of art and history.” “Emerging
out of the perpetual flux of time”, it “blends art and history into one.”44
Michael Field’s “House Beautiful” follows Pater’s model: their interior was a
testament to the blending of classical art (Italian Renaissance) and literature
(Greek, Latin, Elizabethan) and the romantic spirit (most notably their
Dionysian spirit, symbolised in their bacchic library) and this enabled the
“refreshment” of their art. But Michael Hatt’s analysis of Pater’s House
Beautiful throws light on another interesting point of reference that relates
directly to Field’s engagement with Pater. Focusing on Pater’s essay “The
Beginning of Greek Sculpture”, Hatt argues that the essay is an attempt to
reclaim the bodily sensuousness of Greek sculpture as well as a re-affirmation
of the late-Victorian shift to Dionysian aesthetics. In his reading of Pater’s
descriptions of the walls of Alcinous’ palace, Hatt convincingly claims that it
is “as if Pater wanted to assert an erotic coupling of decorative art and desire”.45
At Durdans, objects, books, and decoration spoke of this coupling of decorative
art and the women’s desire as much as of their own history and aesthetics.
On the
New Year’s Day of 1899, Cooper and Bradley decided to leave Durdans and look
for “a new home, human fellowship and more engaging country.” Feeling isolated
from London’s intellectual circles and trapped in a house full of memories of
their beloved ones (Cooper’s father tragically died in 1897) they were keen to
begin a new life now free from the constraints of family. As Edith put it, “I
am still young for life to be memorial.” On the advice of the artists Charles
Ricketts and Charles Shannon, the women went to see “a white, forgotten,
pillared house” at the “heart of Richmond Park”. The house had an
eighteenth-century “pillared entrance from the street”, and “at the back”
Ricketts told the poets, “the garden is at such an incline that the Bassett
[their dog] sitting at the top of the garden would at once slide into the river
if it were not for the door”. This offered, of course, Ricketts added, “unprecedented
opportunities for pushing relations through the door at high tide.” They signed
the lease on the house on February 11, 1899. Ricketts had described the shell
of Durdans as that of a “comfortable English home.” Paragon boasted by contrast
of a beautiful eighteenth-century pillared entrance.
Paragon
was the first house where the women finally lived by themselves as a couple
(Cooper’s sister, Amy, married in 1899)—they called it “our married home”:
“Michael and I watch each other in a little round mirror of Ricketts’ design
that hangs on our gold wall and reflects our life in its circle, this new life
of our deepest desire realised for us.” From the very moment they signed the
lease, Cooper, who led the decoration of Paragon, was sure of one thing: the
decorating principles would be different from those of Durdans. They used both
eighteenth-century aesthetics (mostly through the use of eighteenth-century Sheraton
satinwood furniture) and Japanese art to decorate the new home51. Japanese
wallpaper now replaced William Morris’s: “The Artists [Ricketts and Shannon]
come to find the dining-room papered with the gold Jap canvas. Both Artists are
wild with admiration.” Later in 1910 when they visited the Japanese Exhibition
Cooper noted with delight “How I love this world of Beauty to which I belong.”
If in Durdans they had followed the aesthetic criticism of Ruskin, Morris and
Berenson, the decoration of Paragon followed the flamboyant aestheticism of the
painters Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon: “Settee-Day[.] It came from
Guildford, the deep, orange thing, burnt deep with like the sun . . . the old
Chesterfield was carted away, so Henry [Edith Cooper] begins the twentieth
century worthily, with a most lovely salon, all his own.” In the new home, they
aimed to create moods, tempers and harmonies through colour. The following is a
letter written by Ricketts to Michael Field, in which he advises the women on
how to decorate Paragon:
In colouring a house, see that the temper of
each room is kept. When a room hides from the sun, provide it with colours and
hangings that love the shade: the green of green shadows in the heart of a
wood, blue of that blue haunting a grot, the colours found under the sea. Place
also mirrors in it that listen to you, that look like pools. In these cool
rooms, various objects may be hung or placed ; shadow is kind to ugly but
useful books.
In rooms
that love the sun use colours that love the sun also: white ivory, gold,
yellow, fawn, some shades of rose even. In these rooms, the objects should be
well-chosen ; the sun is angry with ugly, thick shapes, but loves the corners
of delicate frames and dainty furniture. Here the mirrors should be allowed to
talk. Provide them with subjects of conversation: carnations, roses, anemones,
woodbine, rings on hands, fruit in the basket or on a silver dish, Chinese
embroideries.
In a
room given over to melancholy before or after lunch, a blue (the colour of my
dear books) may be combined with white and enlivened with bright pieces of
china, sufficiently expensive to make their sudden destruction undesirable. In
all these rooms strive to keep the furniture close to the walls, as in Persia.
The air and light will love you for this ; a rare carpet may then brood in an
open space ; lady friends will not overset the snowdrops in slender glasses or
bump against things, and male friends or relations will not leave hot briars,
or smouldering cigarettes upon satin wood, or even galoshes.
The
decoration emanated from the “temperament” of the house and aimed to enhance
its moods, creating a closer correspondence between the outside (with its views
upon the river Thames) and the inside. Their house a beautiful object from
which to admire the outside world, now transformed into an impressionistic painting.
The poems “Ebbtime at Sundown” and “Nightfall” from Wilde Honey from Various
Thyme (1908) are examples of this: “Closer in beating heart we could not be/To
the sunk sun, the far, surrendered sea” they wrote in “Ebbtime”. Their
beautiful sonnet “Nightfall” reads as a Whistler “Nocturne”. It recounts an
evening when the women sat together in the Sun Room admiring the passing beauty
of the River Thames. This is how it was recorded in their diary:
Love & I sit on the yellow sofa, curled
up.—A boat is moored in mid-stream, its keel reflected clear in the water.
Henry says—“How that boat measures the silence.”
“I like
the air when the stars come out” Love says, & then our spirits close up
together.
We sit
together in the dusk now . . . The timber-barges with their lights, one orange
& two clear gold, add in their swift passing through the mist, to the
strong excitements of sunset.
And with
the eyes with which we shall see god—vision purified by the beauty on which it
rests—we gaze & wonder.
Just
that we want to watch, as the light alters, just that, nothing else, & no
more.
Two in
accord, four panes of glass, a stream, a misty meadow, & the sun falling
through rounded elms.
If in
Durdans, the women had created an aesthetic interior that located the aesthetic
and erotic in the world, at 1 Paragon they aimed to transform their life into
Art. “We hold that life, between equals, requires an Art”, they wrote, “-or its
style, its beauty, will be lost.” Even its walls were ived as a work of art:
The Artists will mix our paints. They want
us to have the walls of our parlour covered with the gold of the Dial screen at
Warwick Street ; then to treat it in a Dutch manner and devote it to tulips.
Ricketts is enchantingly poetic on the behaviour of flowers under sunlight in
different stories of a house. In the Sun Room, anemones would become like
butterflies and flit to the corners of the room from which the cook with a
duster would have to brush them. Flowers simply take wing when they are high up
in the sunlight, while below in our Dutch room the anemones would never leave
their bowl but glow quietly in their place. The Sun Room must be ivory or have
walls of Indian matting. A hall should be ancestral. No effort to make it speak
of oneself should be taken: it should be yielded to the passage of the
generations, to the transitoriness of comings and goings. This is to keep me
from an expensive paper. The lower rooms should not have such light tones or
light furniture as the higher rooms, as the sun stoops to them and does not
play through them fancifully. My Queen Anne bedroom must have a neutral wall
and every gaiety crowed into Michael’s river bedroom. What makes Ricketts so
essentially an artist in conversation and in composition is the quality of
strangeness by which Life becomes Art.
It is
clear that this change in decoration corresponded to a change in their
attitudes to their own work. As they put it “When we were “going in for every
folly” and visiting theatres every Saturday we bought old oak and Jacobean
furniture. Now we are serious about our work we surround ourselves with
satin-wood. So with the Artists. They hold that Art should be strenuous and
profound and they buy smiling Tanagras and Japanese drawings with their
fragile, decorative grace, and leggy satinwood. It is well to have a smile
round you when you are grave.”60 In this at least they were still under the
influence of Pater. He had ended his “Conclusion” to the Renaissance by suggesting
that Art was contrapuntal to the ephemerality of life: “For Art comes to you
proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as
they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.” At first Bradley was not
convinced about these changes: “Henry [i.e. Cooper] in his big, satin-wood
drawing-room will be altogether modern. I am not without low, muffled pain.”
The fragility of the new aesthetics worried her. She feared they might become
the aesthetic type George Du Maurier created for the satirical magazine Punch:
“One asks if the old home, & all the bad art, & the big furniture was
not a surer place for a child to grow up in than the Kaleidoscope rooms of the
modern. Association ! And if we lose all sense of it, & love things solely
for their clear, bright surfaces, we are damned !” In the end, however, Bradley
accepted the new décor noting in their diary how Paragon was growing “daily
dearer to us, &, as we can afford it, more beautiful.”
There
are no photographs of the interior of the house, but Michael Field’s literary
executor, Thomas Sturge Moore, has left a detailed description of the house:
At No.1, The Paragon, the eighteenth-century
doors and mouldings were painted white, the walls of the small room to the
right on entering were silver. Here Edith worked ; and here, to Ricketts’
intense disapproval, choked down out of respect for affectionate piety, was
installed a mantelpiece by her father, whose hobby had been woodcarving, in
which he was extremely accomplished, but conformed to Swiss taste. Yet, the
birds, flowers and fruits were perhaps conscious of Ghiberti’s, though the
panels and their placing were outrageously not Florentine. There were two
Hiroshigi prints in this room and several lithographs by Shannon. In the
slightly larger room, which opened through folding doors, out of this, they
received. . . . The furniture was eighteenth-century satinwood, severely
elegant rather than florid, all chosen and approved by “The Artists”. Shannon’s
lithographs, dignified, for the first time, with gilded frames of beautiful
proportions, made walls, distempered a warm grey, exquisite ; among them hung
two of Rickett’s Hero and Leander woodcuts and a drawing of two heads of wild
garlic ; later this room was papered with a narrow white and silver stripe.
On the
dainty, polished table-tops stood several pieces of white porcelain and rare
glass, or old plate, and a tangle of necklaces or other jewels were displayed
with artful carelessness. But above all there were flowers in this “Sun Room”.
. . .
The
wainscoting of the stairs and of the tiny downstairs dining-room was apple
green. Here the walls were covered with gilded canvas on which hung a small
round mirror and the sketch for Ricketts’ lovely Tobit and the Angel now in the
Birmingham Gallery ; his Jacob and the Angel, now in the Ashmolean, hung in the
little adjunct to this room, which supported the small glass-house above. In
this adjunct Michael worked.
After
seeing the house Berenson told them: “You ought to be very proud. I have told
Ricketts your house is the most beautiful in England.” The rooms were decorated
with objects bought in antique and specialist shops like Miss Toplady, and, of
course, with art works by Rothenstein, Ricketts and Shannon.
I would like to finish this essay by paying
attention to one of these objects, because it is symbolic of the transformation
they brought into their home and to their lives. Ricketts gave his painting
Jacob Wrestling with the Angel to the women in 1907. They hung it in Bradley’s
bedroom, but interestingly they charged Ricketts himself “2d. to see the
picture in its special little gallery.” He was “charmed with its place” and
gladly paid the amount but he demanded Berenson should be charged “6d. to see
it.” This might seem like a joke and, of course, it was (Berenson had to pay
more because he did not belong to their new aesthetics). But it shows the total
transformation the women had brought to their home, now conceived as an art
gallery. Yet this object is important for another reason too. It is a painting
that symbolically represents the women’s relationship. As Cooper wrote, “we are
struck at our blindness that we did not see the picture was of the inner
mountain solitude of our relation to each other. Michael laurelled, active and
guardian and vigorous, above me in my weary suffering and dependence on strength
that has my confident love”. Not only was the house an art gallery but its art
objects had transformed Michael Field into Art.
Aestheticism
and Decoration: At Home with Michael Field. By Ana
Parejo Vadillo.
Cahiers Victoriens et édouardiens, automne 2011.
More :
Michael
Field and Fin-de- Siècle Culture and Society. By Marion Thain. Adam Matthew Publications, 200?
Author
Emma Donoghue has written a biography on Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote
under the name Michael Field.
A Choice of Poetry by Michael Field
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