This is the site of an online, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to scholarship on the works and lives of the late-Victorian collaborative partnership of Katharine Harris Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Emma Cooper (1862–1913) and their circle. It is edited by Sharon Bickle and Michelle Lee and published by Steven Halliwell and The Rivendale Press as one of the OSCHOLARS group of journals under the general editorship of D. C. Rose.
Bradley and Cooper were devoted lovers, aunt and niece, but before all else, they were poets who published under the name, "Michael Field." In the London of the late-nineteenth century, their literary and artistic circle of friends and correspondents included Oscar Wilde, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Anna Swanwick, Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon, Thomas Sturge Moore, Vernon Lee, George Meredith, George Moore, Bernard Berenson, John Gray, André Raffalovich, Graham R. Thomson, and William Butler Yeats.
Bradley and Cooper were amongst the first generation of women to attend university. Here they met prominent women thinkers such as Jane Harrison and Mary Paley Marshall; campaigned for causes such as the anti-vivisection movement, becoming friends with Frances Power Cobbe; and were involved with the early suffragists supporting Josephine Butler's work against the Contagious Diseases Acts. Later they converted to Catholicism, melding their earlier Pagan sensibility with Christian doctrine to produce devotional poetry.
This journal seeks to publish articles on Michael Field's works and the lives of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, and the writers, artists, Decadents and New Women associated with them, and to examine the influence of gender and sexuality on women writers and women writers' influence on late-Victorian literature and culture. We are interested in the relationship between women and authorship; in the notion of collaborative writing and the male and female collaborations popular at this time; the rise of a materialist society, commodification, concerns about industrialization; the social justice campaigns that transformed British society at the fin-de-siècle; as well as issues surrounding religion and the turn to Rome of many artists and writers.
Bradley and Cooper were devoted lovers, aunt and niece, but before all else, they were poets who published under the name, "Michael Field." In the London of the late-nineteenth century, their literary and artistic circle of friends and correspondents included Oscar Wilde, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Anna Swanwick, Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon, Thomas Sturge Moore, Vernon Lee, George Meredith, George Moore, Bernard Berenson, John Gray, André Raffalovich, Graham R. Thomson, and William Butler Yeats.
Bradley and Cooper were amongst the first generation of women to attend university. Here they met prominent women thinkers such as Jane Harrison and Mary Paley Marshall; campaigned for causes such as the anti-vivisection movement, becoming friends with Frances Power Cobbe; and were involved with the early suffragists supporting Josephine Butler's work against the Contagious Diseases Acts. Later they converted to Catholicism, melding their earlier Pagan sensibility with Christian doctrine to produce devotional poetry.
This journal seeks to publish articles on Michael Field's works and the lives of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, and the writers, artists, Decadents and New Women associated with them, and to examine the influence of gender and sexuality on women writers and women writers' influence on late-Victorian literature and culture. We are interested in the relationship between women and authorship; in the notion of collaborative writing and the male and female collaborations popular at this time; the rise of a materialist society, commodification, concerns about industrialization; the social justice campaigns that transformed British society at the fin-de-siècle; as well as issues surrounding religion and the turn to Rome of many artists and writers.