Michael Field
9781465673275
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
ONE evening, probably in the spring of 1885, Browning was at a dinner-party given by Stopford Brooke. He had recently met for the first time two quiet ladies who had come up to the metropolis from Bristol to visit art galleries and talk business with publishers, and he suddenly announced to the company in a lull of conversation, “I have found a new poet.” But others of the party had made a similar discovery: it had jumped to the eye of the intelligent about a year before, when a tragedy called Callirrhoë had been published; and several voices cried simultaneously to the challenge, “Michael Field!” Only Browning, however, and a few intimate friends of the poets, knew that Michael Field was not a man, but two women, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper. They were an aunt and niece, and came of a Derbyshire family settled at Ashbourne. Joseph Bradley, its representative there in 1749, with his son and grandson after him, were merchants of substance and culture. They were men of intellect as well as business men, and seem to have possessed between them all the elements which ultimately became concentrated in our two poets. There is evidence of a leaning to philosophy, a feeling for the arts, an interest in drama; and, more significant still, there is one Charles Bradley who was “a prolific and meditative writer both of prose and song.” Katharine Harris Bradley, the elder of the two poets, was born at Birmingham on October 27, 1846. Her grandfather had migrated there from Ashbourne in 1810, and her father, Charles Bradley, was a tobacco-manufacturer of that city. He had married in 1834 a Miss Emma Harris of Birmingham, and, in the simpler fashion of those times, he and his wife were living in a house adjoining their place of business in the old quarter of the town. There, at 10 Digbeth, Katharine was born, The only other child of the union was a daughter who was eleven years old at Katharine’s birth. She was named Emma, and was of first importance in the lives of the Michael Fields. For, being a thoughtful creature, of rare sweetness and strength of character, she largely shaped the life of the little sister who was so much younger than herself; and, still more vital fact, she afterward became the mother of our second poet. She married, about 1860, James Robert Cooper, and went with him to live at Kenilworth. Her daughter, Edith Emma Cooper, was born there, at their house in the High Street, on January 12, 1862. Both poets, therefore, took their origin in the heart of a Midland city and came of merchant stock. These facts may have larger significance than their bearing on environment and nurture, though that was important. But regarded more widely, they seem to relate Michael Field and her fine contribution to English literature to that movement in our modern civilization which, in the last two or three generations, has drawn commerce into intimate connexion with our art and letters. Such names as Horniman, Fry, Beecham (and there are others of similar import) suggest at once drama, art, music. They are associated in one’s mind with new impulse, energy, initiative, and above all with disinterested service of the arts; and they are connected chiefly with Midland towns. In like manner Michael Field, with her gift of tragic vision sublimated from fierce Derbyshire elements, may be seen spending a strenuous life and a moderate fortune, without reward or encouragement, to enrich English poetry.
