Michael Field

‘FIELD, Michael’. ‘Michael Field’ was the pseudonym of Katherine Harris Bradley (1846-1914, ‘Michael’) and Edith Emma Cooper (1862-1913, ‘Field’), aunt and niece lovers who jointly published poetry and drama at the end of the 19th century. Bradley and her widowed mother had moved into the household of her older sister, Emma Harris Bradley, and her husband, James Robert Cooper, around the time of the birth of Edith, and Bradley took charge of her niece after Emma became an invalid following the birth of a second child. Bradley’s aesthetic and educational influence must have been strong: she had been briefly a disciple of Ruskin during the 1870s; and she attended the Collège de France in...