'Against the World': Michael Field, female marriage and the aura of amateurism'

This article considers the case of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, an aunt and niece who lived and wrote together as ‘Michael Field’ in the fin-de-siècle Aesthetic movement. Bradley’s bold statement that she and Cooper were ‘closer married’ than the Brownings forms the basis for a discussion of their partnership in terms of a ‘female marriage’, a union that is reflected, as I will argue, in the pages of their writings. However, Michael Field’s exclusively collaborative output, though extensive, was no guarantee for success. On the contrary, their case illustrates the notion, valid for most products of co-authorship, that the jointly written work is always surrounded by an aura of amateurism. Since collaboration defied the ingrained notion of the author as the solitary producer of his or her work, critics and readers have time and again attempted to ‘parse’ the collaboration by dissecting the co-authored work into its constituent halves, a treatment that the Fields too failed to escape

‘Licking the Chops of Memory’: Plotting the Social Sins of Jekyll and Hyde

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is hierarchical in its very title—alphabetically Hyde precedes Jekyll, but Jekyll’s superior education and culture are associated with social status whereas Hyde’s ‘Mr.’ is a courtesy title often hedged in with demonic or animalistic terms. But despite the division insisted on in the title, Jekyll’s wilful complicity in the fate that overtakes him is suggested in a series of clues, ranging from his symbolic association with vivisection to the ostentatious exclusion of a female voice (typically the source of spiritual guidance or inspiration in Victorian fiction). As Hyde engages in an ascending scale of brutal acts, beginning with the assault of a child, the middle-class male peer group attempts to exculpate or protect Jekyll from association with this rebarbative and criminal figure. But following the murder of Sir Danvers Carew, the climactic discovery of Hyde’s body provides the final evidence against Jekyll himself—in rejecting the possibility of religious salvation, he has deliberately chosen the evil that his final statement presents as the ‘assault’ of an ungovernable temptation

British women's writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury /

This five-volume series historically contextualizes and traces developments in women?s fiction from 1840 to 1940. Critically assessing both canonical and lesser-known British women?s writing decade by decade, it redefines the landscape of women?s authorship across a century of dynamic social and cultural change. With each of its volumes devoted to two decades, the series is wide in scope but historically sharply defined. Volume 1 inaugurates the series by historically and culturally contextualizing Victorian women?s writing distinctly within the 1840s and 1850s. Using a range of critical perspectives including political and literary history, feminist approaches, disability studies, and the history of reading, the volume?s 16 original essays consider such developments as the construction of a post-Romantic tradition, the politicization of the domestic sphere, and the development of crime and sensation writing. Centrally, it reassesses key mid-nineteenth-century female authors in the context in which they first published while also recovering neglected women writers who helped to shape the literary landscape of the 1840s and 1850s.1. 1840s and 1850s.This five-volume series historically contextualizes and traces developments in women?s fiction from 1840 to 1940. Critically assessing both canonical and lesser-known British women?s writing decade by decade, it redefines the landscape of women?s authorship across a century of dynamic social and cultural change. With each of its volumes devoted to two decades, the series is wide in scope but historically sharply defined. Volume 1 inaugurates the series by historically and culturally contextualizing Victorian women?s writing distinctly within the 1840s and 1850s. Using a range of critical perspectives including political and literary history, feminist approaches, disability studies, and the history of reading, the volume?s 16 original essays consider such developments as the construction of a post-Romantic tradition, the politicization of the domestic sphere, and the development of crime and sensation writing. Centrally, it reassesses key mid-nineteenth-century female authors in the context in which they first published while also recovering neglected women writers who helped to shape the literary landscape of the 1840s and 1850s