Making All Things New: An Introduction

Summary

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

—T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (1920)

All authors try to do something new: to tell a new story, or tell an old one in a new way. This book is about two late nineteenth-century female co-authors who were passionate about rewriting old histories and stories and who did so with extraordinary innovation—what we might call revisionary poetics. Indeed, for aunt and niece Katharine Harris Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Emma Cooper (1862–1913), who called themselves “Poets and lovers” and who wrote as Michael Field, the revisionary poetics of repurposing old stories, histories, and traditional literary forms was nothing short of high art.

In 1892, Bradley wrote the following in a letter to her beloved life and writing partner: “To see things for oneself, to speak of them as they really are to oneself, to face life with unbiased eyes as the men who began literature did—this is the longing of the modern world.” Here, echoing a Paterian aestheticism as she also expresses affinity for “the men who began literature,” Bradley articulates both a fascination for the past and a keen sympathy with the affect of the modern world. Indeed, for collaborative authors and female aesthetes whose oeuvre is so clearly inspired by figures and literary forms from the past, both Bradley and Cooper devote considerable energy in their diaries and letters, both of their own volition and at the urging of their friends, to the modern and the new. In their diaries and letters we learn that even while admiring many of Michael Field’s adaptations of figures and texts from the past, their friend, art critic Bernard Berenson, repeatedly advised them to “Be Contemporaneous;” and when in 1888 their work was not received as warmly as they wished, Robert Browning counseled them to “wait fifty years.” For every published treatment of figures such as Sappho, Mary Queen of Scots, La Gioconda, Callirrhoë, and Canute the Great, and for every reworking of the Sapphic fragment, Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama, paintings by Grand Masters, Renaissance lyric, elegy, or devotional verse, in Michael Field’s more private writings we can also find the co-authors repeatedly expressing sentiments such as “I do not yet realize where modernity is taking me,” and “We must make all things new.”