Introduction

Abstract

Michael Field, the poetic identity created by Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862–1913), ceaselessly experimented with forms of identity and forms of literary expression. Their modes of self-creation—their deliberate and highly conscious construction of the poet Michael Field and their personal identities as “Henry” and “Michael”—are analogous to their poetic creations, and both enable them to address questions of aesthetics, identity, modernity, and history. Drawing on the insights of new lyric studies and new formalism, I read both gender and genre as socially inflected forms that need to be interpreted and understood in the context of the conditions that engendered their creation. This chapter provides the rationale for the book and the necessary background to contextualize the chapters: Cooper and Bradley’s life and works; other scholarship on Michael Field; new lyric and new formalist methodology. It also provides an overview of the book’s chapters.