R. Ehnenn

All authors try to do something new, or tell an old story in a new way; but for Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote as Michael Field and called themselves ’Poets and Lovers’, rewriting old stories, history and traditional literary forms with extraordinary innovation was nothing short of high art. Offering new readings of a wide range of Michael Field texts, this book asks: how do ambitious experiments with a joint diary, closet drama, ekphrasis, elegy and nature, devotional and love poetry help these women navigate the paradox of looking backward in order to achieve their goal ’to make all things new’? How do their revisionary poetics help the co-authors, as queer, female Aesthetes, cope with late-Victorian modernity? Through an interdisciplinary approach to their passionate and sometimes eccentric life and work, this book provokes thought about the fin-de-siècle and invites readers, like Michael Field themselves, to engage the past in order to create transtemporal community and to make sense of the present.

Jill R. Ehnenn is Professor of English at Appalachian State University, where she is also standing faculty in the Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies Program. Her research interests include Victorian literature and culture, especially British aestheticism; ekphrasis and the visual arts; LGBTQ literary history; and feminist and queer theory. She has published on a wide range of nineteenth-century writers and is the author of Women’s Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture(2008/ 2017).