Introduction: Sharing Poet and Muse

As collaborating poets who were also engaged in a lifelong romantic relationship, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper provide the ideal starting point for this study. Their endeavour to simultaneously harness poetic identity through the shared pseudonym ‘Michael Field’ is complicated by their desire to write love poems in praise of each other, disrupting the ‘oneness’ of Michael Field by directing the gaze towards the other as muse-object. This chapter will establish that throughout their career, Bradley and Cooper exhibited a complex engagement with the roles of both poet and muse. This engagement was, at least in the early stages of critical interest in their work, interpreted as idiosyncratic, placing ‘Michael Field’ outside the category of ‘woman poet’ altogether. For example, in her influential study Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (1992), Angela Leighton argues that in contrast to their poetic foremothers, Michael Field did not seem to suffer from the same anxieties in claiming poetic identity:

Leighton's, understanding of Michael Field rather unhelpfully decontextualizes and dehistoricizes Bradley and Cooper's, work by placing them beyond the reach of their Victorian contemporaries.