After the death of their beloved dog Whym Chow, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who write collectively as Michael Field, underwent a radical spiritual and poetic shift by converting to the Roman Catholic Church. Each partner viewed this shift differently. Bradley focused on the ways in which Whym Chow’s death represented a rupture in their domestic Trinity, while Cooper focused on the sacrificial aspects of euthanising the dog as an act of their own will. Converting to the Roman Catholic Church impacted both Bradley and Cooper’s relationship with one another and their poetic creativity and dominated the final years of their shared life.

This chapter focuses on the companion volumes Mystic Trees and Poems of Adoration to explore the ways Michael Field’s poetry changed following Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s 1907 conversion to Roman Catholicism. This chapter reviews prior scholarship on Field’s devotional poetry, which has often emphasised the continuity between Field’s pre- and post- conversion work. The chapter builds on this scholarship by arguing that Field’s devotional poetry, informed by their newfound faith, explores new ways of thinking about time, suffering, and the purpose of art. Furthermore, this chapter explores the significance of studying Victorian devotional and religious verse, and the ways women and queer people were able to use the genre to engage with and build upon theological concepts, outside the bounds of ecclesiastical authority.

This chapter considers Michael Field’s collaborative authorship, focusing on the tension between singularity and plurality in their shared authorial identity. It explores Michael Field’s pseudonymous collaboration as a constant negotiation between multiple voices that radically revises conceptions of both life-writing and verse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter surveys Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s shared diary Works and Days and their poems, such as ‘A girl’ to show how they generate a sense of unison in their work, in the process achieving a fluid negotiation between different voices.

This chapter considers Michael Field’s position as ‘Victorian decadents’ in the early twentieth century. It outlines Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s ambivalent response to fin-de-siècle decadence, as seen in their reactions to the likes of Oscar Wilde and The Yellow Book. The chapter then proposes that Michael Field actually became more attached to decadence as the ‘yellow nineties’ waned, focusing on how Bradley and Cooper’s dedication to decadence is expressed most clearly in poems about Whym Chow, their beloved dog whose death in 1906 catalysed their conversion to Catholicism. The chapter finally discusses the decadent tropes found in Whym Chow: Flame of Love (1914) and Michael Field’s Catholic poems.

Bradley and Cooper wanted their works to be published in formats that were concretely expressive of their contents. From 1890 onwards, virtually none of their books was left untouched by the designer’s hand, and Bradley and Cooper sought out some of the most innovative designers and printers of their day (their long working relationship with Charles Ricketts especially stands out) to produce appropriate print forms for their works. Yet even before the 1890s, Bradley and Cooper strove to match elements of book design to their poetics: from the very start, they had conceptualised their books as embodied objets d’art, and their aestheticism inspired every aspect of their books.