Michael Field was the shared pseudonym of Katherine Bradley (1846-1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862- 1913), who lived together as lovers and collaboratively wrote some eight volumes of poetry and twenty-seven plays. Their poetry enjoyed both popular and critical success until their friend, the poet Robert Browning, let slip Field's true identity: in the milieu of Victorian letters, the work of women writers (and especially collaborators, spinsters, and lesbians, as biographer Emma Donoghue puts it) was still relegated to a second class. While their early poetry displays strong aestheticist currents both formally and thematically, their later poems incorporate an eclectic mix of Symbolism and Catholic spirituality without ever straying from an idiosyncratic style that is at once extravagantly precise and profoundly sensuous.
