Michael Field (author)

Michael Field was a pseudonym used for the poetry and verse drama of the English authors Katherine Harris Bradley (27 October 1846 – 26 September 1914) and her niece and ward Edith Emma Cooper (12 January 1862 – 13 December 1913).

Her grandfather, also Charles Bradley, was a prominent follower and financial backer of prophetess Joanna Southcott and her self-styled successor John "Zion" Ward.

[6] Bradley and Cooper wrote a number of passionate love poems to each other, and their name, Michael Field, was their way of declaring their inseparable oneness.

Their religious inclinations are reflected in their later works while their earlier writing was influenced by classical and Renaissance culture in its pagan aspects, particularly Sappho as understood by the late Victorians and perhaps Walter Savage Landor.

[11] Bradley left most of her property[clarification needed] to Charles Ricketts with a bequest of letters to the poet Frederick Gurney Salter and jewels and manuscripts to the University of Cambridge.

[12][13] In 1923, saddened at the lack of a memorial for Bradley and Cooper, Charles Ricketts designed one for them of black stone, for which John Gray wrote the epitaph: 'United in blood, united in Christ'.

[16] A much-edited selection from the journals, which consists of two dozen annual volumes in ledgers with aspects of scrapbooks combined with a self-conscious literary style of composition, was prepared by T. Sturge Moore, a friend through his mother Marie.

A review of their poems in 1908 noted that "One of the London weeklies, announcing the new volume, comments on the strange anomaly that a poet of 'Michael Field’s' distinction should have had such slight recognition in this country."

[17] The Athenaeum noted that "Seven years ago both poets were received into the Roman Church, and their definitely Catholic work is represented by two volumes of devotional verse: 'Poems of Adoration,' by the younger, and 'Mystic Trees,' by the elder writer.