UD Home | UDaily | UDaily-Alumni | UDaily-Parents


HIGHLIGHTS

30 movies featured at Newark Film Festival, Sept. 4-11

D.C.-area Blue Hens gather Sept. 24 at the Old Ebbitt Grill

Baltimore-area Hens invited to meet Ravens QB Joe Flacco

New Graduate Student Convocation set Wednesday

Center for Disabilities Studies' Artfest set Sept. 6

New Student Convocation to kick off fall semester Tuesday

Latino students networking program meets Tuesday

Fall Student Activities Night set Monday

SNL alumni Kevin Nealon, Jim Breuer to perform at Parents Weekend Sept. 26

Soledad O'Brien to keynote Latino Heritage event Sept. 18

UD Library Associates exhibition now on view

Childhood cancer symposium registrations due Sept. 5

UD choral ensembles announce auditions

Child care provider training courses slated

Late bloomers focus of Sept. 6 UDBG plant sale

Chicago Blue Hens invited to Aug. 30 Donna Summer concert

All fans invited to Aug. 30 UD vs. Maryland tailgate, game

'U.S. Space Vehicles' exhibit on display at library

Families of all students will reunite on campus Sept. 26-28

More news on UDaily

Subscribe to UDaily's e-mail services


UDaily is produced by the Office of Public Relations
150 South College Ave.
Newark, DE 19716-2701
(302) 831-2791

Symposium explores lives of writers known as ‘Michael Field’

Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Michael Field.’
11:26 a.m., Feb. 17, 2004--In late-Victorian London, a pair of bold and unusual women decided to become poets and playwrights. They wrote collaboratively and called themselves “Michael Field,” knowing that their work would get a fairer hearing if critics thought it came from a man.

But, these two women were more than just literary collaborators; they were devoted lovers, who lived together for decades until their deaths. They were well-known in their own day, but they were also friends with many more famous avant-garde artists and writers from Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic and Decadent circles, including Oscar Wilde.

On Feb. 27-29, the University of Delaware will host the first scholarly symposium devoted to the work, the lives and the intellectual and cultural milieu of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the lesbian couple who wrote as “Michael Field.”

“’Michael Field’ and Their World: An Educational Weekend” at the University of Delaware opens at 7 p.m. Friday, Feb. 27, with a free public lecture by Stephen Calloway, titled “Poets and Artists: The ‘Michael Fields’ and Their Aesthetic Circle.”

Calloway, the bestselling British author of books on Wilde, on the artist Aubrey Beardsley and on Decadent style, is associate curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. A reception and viewing of an exhibition of “Michael Field” books, photographs and letters follows the lecture in Memorial Hall.

The weekend symposium continues all day Saturday, Feb. 28, with presentations by more than 30 distinguished academics from the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, Switzerland and Japan. Other events that day include a recital of previously unperformed songs discovered in one of “Michael Field’s” manuscripts. There also will be a slide show of conceptual photography inspired by Bradley and Cooper’s life story, created by Maria DeGuzman, assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

This exploration of the writers’ world concludes on Sunday afternoon with a visit to the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington, home to one of the largest and finest collections of Pre-Raphaelite art, and a lecture by the British scholar Jan Marsh, an expert on the Pre-Raphaelites and on women artists. Marsh is the biographer of the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and of his sister, the poet Christina Rossetti.

Marsh’s lecture, at 1 p.m. Feb. 29, is open to the public. To reserve a seat for that lecture, which includes lunch, at a cost of $10 for Delaware Art Museum members and $15 for nonmembers, call the museum at (302) 571-9590 by Feb. 20.

“‘”Michael Field” and Their World’ will appeal to audiences with a wide range of interests,” according to Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Delaware and co-organizer of the weekend events.

“After many years of neglect, these two writers are being studied all around the world,” Stetz says. “People find them fascinating, because they broke every rule in sight. In the late 19th century, women weren't supposed to attend universities, but the ‘Michael Fields’ did. Women weren't supposed to be authorities on the Greek Classics, but these two women were. Respectable women weren't supposed to have anything to do with the stage, but they wrote plays and had one of their works produced. English Protestants weren't supposed to be attracted to other religions, but they both converted to Roman Catholicism. And, women certainly weren't supposed to love each other passionately, but they did.”

If the “Michael Fields” are interesting characters in their own right, they are equally notable for their friends and influences. These included established Victorian celebrities, such as Robert Browning and John Ruskin, along with controversial new figures, such as the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. Bradley and Cooper recorded their lively opinions about everyone they knew in their journals. In November 2000, BBC Radio in Britain broadcast a 10-part series based on these writings.

“Their journals read like a who's who of the time,” Mark Samuels Lasner, senior research fellow at the University of Delaware Library and co-organizer of the symposium events, says. “They had connections with virtually every writer and artist of consequence from the 1880s until the First World War.”

Samuels Lasner, who is a bibliographer and a noted book collector, also emphasizes the beauty of the books that the “Michael Fields” produced as one of the factors that draws scholars to them now. “Theirs are exquisite volumes, in which the aesthetics are as impressive as the writing,” he says. Some of those volumes will be on display in the Friday evening exhibition after Calloway’s opening lecture.

“’Michael Field’ and Their World“ is sponsored by the Women's Studies Program, the College of Arts and Sciences and the departments of English and Art History at the University of Delaware; the University of Delaware Library; the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation; the Delaware Art Museum; the William Morris Society in the U. S.; and the Eighteen Nineties Society.

More information, including a registration form, is available on the symposium's web site at [www.udel.edu/WomensStudies/michaelfield.htm].

  E-mail this article

To learn how to subscribe to UDaily, click here.