Houghton Library welcomes Ana Parejo Vadillo, who will give the Spring 2025 Philip and Frances Hofer Lecture on "Queer Bindings: Women Artists and the Michael Field Book."

“Michael Field” was the joint pseudonym of Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862–1913). As a singular male poet, the women gained fame for the verse drama Callirrhoë (1884) and the magnificent book of verse Long Ago (1889). Bradley and Cooper regarded the poetry book as art, engaging with key book artists of the period to produce stunning editions that often appeared in Arts and Crafts exhibitions across Europe. Scholars have long commented that Bradley and Cooper were part of coteries of male writers and artists; however, in this talk, Vadillo demonstrates that they also worked with women artists with whom they queerly bound the poet Michael Field.

Bio:  Dr Ana Parejo Vadillo is Reader in Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the 2024 Amy P. Goldman Fellow in Pre-Raphaelite Studies. She writes on women’s poetry, aestheticism, decadence, and cosmopolitanism. Her books include Women’s Poets and Urban Aestheticism (2005), the co-edited volumes Michael Field, the Poet: Published and Manuscript Materials (2009) and Michael Field: Decadent Moderns (2019).  She is currently finishing two books, the monograph Poetry in Polygamy for Oxford University Press and the co-edited collection The Verse Dramas of Michael Field for Cambridge University Press.

Image: Detail of Michael Field. A Question of Memory. London, 1893. 23497.35.3. Kenneth Matheson Taylor Fund, 1914. Widener Library.