This chapter focuses the entangled relationship between the beginnings of Michael Field scholarship in the 1990s and the rise of queer studies in the same period. The chapter connects Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s queerness not only to their lesbian partnership but also to the incestual dimension of their relationship. The chapter then focuses on what Michael Field can teach us about queer friendships, especially through their relations with Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, about queer marriage, domesticity, and concepts of the queer ordinary/queer normalcy.

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.

Michael Field and Oscar Wilde moved in overlapping cultural and social circles from the mid-1880s to his imprisonment in May 1895. Their mutual acquaintances included Bernard Berenson, John Gray, Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon, Robert Ross, and William Rothenstein. Bradley was eager to befriend Wilde at one of Louise Chandler Moulton’s ‘at-homes’ in 1890. In 1891, the coauthors paid a visit to Wilde’s family residence. Later, they sought his advice on their only staged drama, A Question of Memory (1893). They maintained, too, a strong interest in Wilde’s comedies. Still, Bradley, Cooper, and Wilde never became close friends. Nonetheless, after Wilde’s demise in late 1900, Michael Field respected his legacy, attending the double bill of Salome and A Florentine Tragedy in 1906, choosing to remember him positively.

Katharine Bradley is responsible for the now well-known sonnets admired as the work of Michael Field. Many are collected in Wild Honey from Various Thyme (1908), a volume in preparation since at least 1893, though Bradley had been writing sonnets since 1869. This chapter details some of her earlier work, noting especially her use of the art sonnet and the memorial (or elegiac) sonnet. It examines her radical experiments with the sonnet form and her remarkable ability to translate ideas, impressions, and prose sources swiftly and deftly into fluent verse. A supreme later example of poetic translation is ‘Fifty Quatrains’ in Wild Honey, written for Charles Ricketts, her male muse, and the recipient, like Edith Cooper, of many fine later sonnets. Ivor Treby’s invaluable selections include noteworthy sonnets by Bradley unpublished in their day, though other examples very likely remain in the archives.

This chapter places Michael Field within the House Beautiful movement, discussing their practice in relation to Walter Pater, William Morris, and others. I focus on the aesthetic interiors of their two homes, Durdans and Paragon, showing how they were curated around their lyrics. I propose that Michael Field queered the House Beautiful movement, their practice representing a radical queering of the Doll’s House.

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.

This chapter considers the importance of life writing to the development of Decadent literary production and to the afterlives of the Decadent movement. Beginning with Walter Pater, we explore the creative approach Decadent writers took to biography and the imagined fictional life. If Wilde, Pater, and John Addington Symonds established the pattern of Decadent life writing, Charles Ricketts and Laurence Housman deployed its practices and politics as they recalled Wilde’s tragic downfall and early death. In the early years of the twentieth century the history of British literary Decadence was still very much contested, and alongside life writing emerged the memoir and the period study that framed the 1890s in relation to the literary innovations of modernism. The creative approach to Decadent life writing waned in the second half of the twentieth century as professional literary critics sought to develop authoritative versions of Decadent biography, a practice seemingly at odds with earlier Decadent practices.