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College Town Conversations: “Poets and lovers evermore”: The Remarkable Story of Two Victorian Women Writers In-Person / Online
Professor Carolyn Dever will discuss the remarkable story of “Michael Field,” the Victorian author who was in fact two women. This is a hybrid event. Join us in person in the Mayer Room or online via Zoom. No registration required in person; register for Zoom here.
Michael Field was known to late-Victorian readers as a superb poet and playwright—until Robert Browning let slip Michael FIeld’s secret identity: in fact, “Michael Field” was a pseudonym for Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913), who were lovers, a devoted couple, and aunt and niece. For thirty years, Bradley and Cooper kept a joint diary titled Works and Days that eventually reached almost 10,000 pages. A who’s who of late-Victorian art worlds, the diary tells the extraordinary story of the love, art, ambitions, and domestic life of a queer couple in fin de siecle England.
Please come join a discussion about the diary—a story stranger than fiction!—and its brilliant, enigmatic authors.
Carolyn Dever, Professor of English and Creative Writing, is a scholar and teacher of British literature and culture of the nineteenth century. She is the author of Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diary of Michael Field (Princeton University Press, 2022), and the editor of One Soul We Divided: A Critical Edition of the Diary of Michael Field (Princeton University Press, 2023). Dever's earlier books include Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (Cambridge), Skeptical Feminisms: Activist Theory, Activist Practice (Minnesota), The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton), and The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope (Cambridge). She is co-editor, with Amy Kahrmann Huseby, of the ongoing Cambridge History of Victorian Women's Writing.
- Date:
- Tuesday, April 23, 2024
- Time:
- 6:30pm - 7:30pm
- Time Zone:
- Eastern Time - US & Canada (change)
- Location:
- Mayer Room
- Online:
- This is an online event.
- Event URL:
- https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0lc-GgqT0vHNL6lqBQft0sllfObqKCFyhp
- Categories:
- Adult