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.