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Why a monumental diary by an aunt and niece who published poetry together as “Michael Field”—and who were partners and lovers for decades—is one of the great unknown works of late-Victorian and early modernist literatureMichael Field, the renowned late-Victorian poet, was well known to be the pseudonym of Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and her niece, Edith Cooper (1862–1913). Less well known is that for three decades, the women privately maintained a romantic relationship and kept a double diary, sharing the page as they shared a bed and eventually producing a 9,500-page, twenty-nine-volume story of love, life, and art in the fin de siècle. In Chains of Love and Beauty, the first book about the diary, Carolyn Dever makes the case for this work as a great unknown “novel” of the nineteenth century and as a bridge between George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Victorian marriage plot and modernist experimentation.While Bradley and Cooper remained committed to publishing poetry under a single, male pseudonym, the diary, which they entitled Works and Days and hoped would be published after their deaths, allowed them to realize literary ambitions that were publicly frustrated during their lifetime. The women also used the diary, which remains largely unpublished, to negotiate their art, desires, and frustrations, as well as their relationships with contemporary literary celebrities, including Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and Walter Pater.Showing for the first time why Works and Days is a great experimental work of late-Victorian and early modernist writing, one that sheds startling new light on gender, sexuality, and authorship, Dever reveals how Bradley and Cooper wrote their shared life as art, and their art as life, on pages of intimacy that they wanted to share with the world ""Michael Field" was the pseudonym of two women writing as a male author: Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who were aunt and niece, and a devoted couple for three decades that spanned the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. While much has been written about the Fields' many volumes of poetry and plays, and about their strange and complicated life, this book is the first to focus on their diary, which they kept for twenty-five years and viewed as an "unpublished manuscript" called Works and Days. In this book, Dever argues that Works and Days represents one of the great experimental prose narratives of the transitional period between Victorian and modernist literature. Through the co-written diary, which fills twenty-nine volumes and about 9,500 pages, the women envisioned a life beyond the tight horizons of one home and one family, and portrayed new forms of women's intimacy at the dawn of the twentieth century. Dever focuses on five pivotal years in the life of Bradley and Cooper as reflected in the diary: the death of Cooper's mother; a year of personal and professional humiliation; the death of Cooper's father; the women's establishment of their home together; and the event they experience as a devastating loss, the death of their dog Whym Chow. In this examination of the Fields' most personal writing, Dever establishes their unlikely role as a bridge between the Victorians and the experiments of modernism to come"--
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