Writing a Life: A Conclusion and a Provocation

Summary

I came too soon.

—George Egerton, “A Keynote to Keynotes” (1932)

I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions.

—Michel Foucault, Interview with Lucette Finas (1977)

This book has been concerned with how to understand Michael Field’s re-visions of forms and narratives as they pursued their greatest hope—for great recognition and acclaim—a hope that famously prompted Robert Browning to caution, “Wait fifty years.” In seeking such understanding, I have asked how experimentation with literary form and genre helps Michael Field navigate the paradox of looking backward in order to “Be contemporaneous”; and, “to make all things new.” I have also considered how the co-authors’ anachronisms and formal literary innovations function in the context of being homoerotically inclined, female authors and aesthetes, and in context of their conflicted attitudes toward late Victorian modernity in general and decadence in particular. Throughout this project I have asserted that Michael Field’s oeuvre can and should be read as a series of ambitious experiments with literary traditions and forms; that their revisionary poetics are shaped by a Dionysian eros and queer-feminist sensibility that complicate their otherwise Paterian aesthetics and Hegelian view of history; and that we can observe, in their varied formal and historical experiments, an affective orientation toward and phenomenological engagement with the unknowable and unutterable that, among other things, reflects their status as embodied female, homoerotically inclined fin de siècle subjects. In many ways, as we have seen, Bradley and Cooper celebrate their femininity, queer desires, and queer friends, but they also felt keenly disadvantaged by what we today would call heteronormativity, as well as the sexism and male entitlement they experienced while, as Sara Ahmed would put it, “traveling under the sign, woman” (Living a Feminist Life 14). Navigating health and spiritual change, cultural developments ranging from wars to omnibuses to telephones, and personal and professional successes and tragedies, Bradley and Cooper’s life and work, as Michael Field, provide consistent examples of “the vital role art can play in developing self-determining queer identities” and how queerness can be an advantage that makes possible intellectual and creative freedom (Friedman 6–7).