Hidden History: The Lesbians of Michael Field (Part Two)

Hidden History is my new Monday afternoon column for The New Gay. Each week, I’ll cover a different nook or cranny in the gay and lesbian past.

For those of you joining us midstream, please do read “The Lesbians of Michael Field (Part One).”

If you just want the summary: ‘Michael Field’ was the literary pseudonym for the combined efforts of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper. Little-known today, they lived during the Victorian and Edwardian eras and published eleven books of poetry and thirty plays using the name. Bradley and Cooper were also engaged in a passionate and lifelong emotional and sexual relationship. In their case, “lifelong” ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie: they lived together until their deaths…and Bradley was Cooper’s aunt.

Katherine Bradley had much to do with her niece’s upbringing long before their romantic relationship began. Bradley’s older sister, Lissie, and her husband James had two children, Edith and Amy. As Lissie spent most of her short life in poor health, Katherine became an obvious maternal figure for the two children. Katherine vastly preferred Edith, who—extremely well-read, philosophical, and literary—was much less the typical young Victorian girl than her sister. By the time Katherine was in her early 30s and Edith in her mid-to-late teens, they were constantly together as a couple: socializing and sleeping together, referring to each other as “love,” “lover” and “beloved,” and beginning to write and jointly edit each other’s writing.

Lesbian fiction writer, editor, and critic Emma Donoghue wrote a short, deeply moving biography of the pair, We Are Michael Field (now sadly out-of-print). In it, Donoghue aptly notes “the two women had no precedents for this relationship; they made it up as they went along.” If their relationship had been understood during its time the way we understand it now, it would have been cause for shock and social ostracism.

So how did two nice Victorian ladies pull off an incestuous lesbian relationship without bringing the notoriously strict Victorian moral order down upon their heads? In part, the explanation lies in the changing nature of language and of gay and lesbian identity—a change that causes much early gay history to be covered up or ignored.

First, neither woman seems to have felt it necessary to define the relationship the way relationships are marked today. In her and Edith’s joint diary, Katherine compared their relationship to that of the late poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her husband Robert (a friend of Katherine and Edith’s). Katherine claimed that, because she and Edith collaborated in their writing, they “were closer married” than the Brownings. From this kind of comparison, she and Edith obviously took their relationship very seriously. But even in their diaries, they never used the word ‘lesbian,’ never wrote of themselves as ‘inverts’ or ‘Urningins’ or any of the other terms that were beginning to be used to put a name on their type of love. This mirrored the actions of the ‘Michael’s’ good friends, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, a pair of gay artists who also did not discuss themselves as gay men. So the ‘Michael Fields’ could be very direct in their poetry:

I love her with the seasons, with the winds,
As the stars worship, as anemones
Shudder in secret for the sun, as bees
Buzz round an open flower ("Constancy")

But they rarely directly defined the nature of their love. It was, in the words of Emma Donoghue, a “transitional lesbian generation” where people could know what they were about without always finding it necessary to place a term on the relationship.

In a way, their family relationship also gave them greater latitude in addressing each other passionately. As Donoghue points out, “For many Victorians, family affection was a cult. Passions for parents and siblings expressed in nineteenth-century diaries, which can sound almost incestuous to us, seemed utterly natural to them.” So in rare cases like those of the ‘Michael Fields,’ where the relationship actually was sexual, there was a built-in excuse. Edith’s phrases in their diaries, such as “My love heals me in her breast” and “we are each more of a bodily sweetness to each other,” were not that far from the over-the-top “darlings” and “beloveds” and exclamations of “you are my life” typically exchanged within the family and even among close friends.

Of course, this becomes a problem in the present day. It can be tempting for modern-day gays and lesbians, on the search for role-models and traces of their collective romantic and sexual history, to find a homosexual under every rock. It’s worth keeping in mind that our current definitions cannot always be imposed on people from the past. What sounds like love language did not always imply romance or sex.

Far more destructive, though, is the desperate attempt on the part of many researchers—motivated by garden-variety homophobia—to cover up and explain away historical gay and lesbian identities and relationships. Trying to deny the existence of same-sex desire on the part of everyone from Walt Whitman to President James Buchanan to Emily Dickinson to Michelangelo, “scholars” have argued that the passionate language they used was always simply a convention of its time period and cannot be read as evidence of sexual attraction. This out-of-hand rejection of homosexuality does unfortunate damage in attempting to fully understand historical lives.

Katherine and Edith’s poetry passionately evokes the twists in their own feelings for each other, and their use of the male pseudonym served as acceptable cover in writing love poems to each other. To try to understand their lives and work without acknowledging the erotic and emotional relationship at the core is futile. It is equally futile to discuss other historical gays and lesbians without acknowledging the nature of their sexuality and its effect on their lives.

A closing note on Michael Field: Donoghue’s biography We Are Michael Field is highly, highly, highly worth seeking out to learn more about Katherine and Edith. From their intimidatingly formal language to their occasional bouts of snobbishness to their deeply-held belief that their chow dog had been sent into their lives in order to convert them to Catholicism, the ‘Michael Fields’ were two weird, wonderful ladies. The story of their lives as Donoghue tells it makes fascinating, strangely affecting reading, and humanizes even the oddest parts of their personalities. In the absence of a lengthy critical biography—which they deserve and which Donoghue practically begs someone to write—it is the best book about them available.

Next week: (Alain) Locke and Key

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philip@thenewgay.net.