Long Ago (1889), Michael Field's inaugural collection of verse, celebrated Sappho, the ancient poetess of Lesbos. The volume proclaimed the diversity of her sexuality; it saluted verse that was connected to the self; and it urged the authenticity of her creative force in ages beyond her death. Taking surviving fragments of Sapphic writing as embarkation points for new poems in her spirit, Michael Field, the joint pseudonym of the two poets Katherine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), hailed the continuing presence of the Greek in the modern age, drawing the reader back to an imagined version of Sappho's mind and experience, her desires and troubles, of which history held so slight a record. Developing ideas articulated by Robert Browning, particularly in the opening book of The Ring and the Book (1868–69), Long Ago discerned in poetry a way of regenerating the energy – or of creating the illusion of such regeneration – of an almost-lost, but indisputably authentic person from the ancient Mediterranean. The volume privileged a post-Romantic assumption about the signal importance of the self behind writing, the complexities and contradictions of which I explore here, and it understood modern poetry's dealings with a nearly vanished Greece as recuperative of a nearly disappeared artist. As such, Long Ago implicitly imagined the work of the contemporary poet as, to use Robert Browning's word, a matter of “galvanism” (Browning I.740): the calling back into the present of the lost forms of distant lives.

Long Ago undertakes the search for a hidden woman writer by ventriloquizing Sappho – as, to be sure, many had done before – and by creating a fictive glimpse of her life, her mind, and the erotic power of her desire.¹

In so doing the volume opens up – distinctively, thoughtfully – a series of questions about writing and futurity, celebrity and the cost of fame, survival through words, and the distorting agency of admirers. Its substance is saturated with ideas about authorship that are revealing of Michael Field's own mind as they negotiated the peculiar challenges of their presence in late-Victorian literary culture. I map the volume's ruminations on poetry and posterity and what they disclose about Michael Field's conception of the task of writing early in their career. Conscious of a critical history – from Lillian Faderman onwards² – that emphasizes the sexual identity of those poets as the decisive factor of their authorship, my essay, while not ignoring the significance of their sexual dissonance, examines the exfoliation of ideas in their verse without confining interpretation to issues of sexual politics. In searching out the complexities of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper's deliberation on art's survival, the relations between antiquity and the present, and the ways in which the Sappho of Long Ago dramatized elements of their own position and their composite, secretive authorial persona, I expose complexities, hitherto not the subject of critical discussion, and analyze their distinctive interventions into debates that formed part of the currency of a wider literary culture.

Michael Field in 1889 had inherited a Sapphic tradition. That tradition had been exemplified most recently by Algernon Charles Swinburne in Poems and Ballads of 1866, a volume which had privileged the poet of Lesbos as an embodiment of the artist's capacity to survive through time, luminously beyond the grave. It is in negotiation with Swinburne that the individuality of Michael Field's position is, in part, articulated. But before examining that position, the wider pulses of thought in Long Ago about loss, the ambiguities of consolation, and the fragility of cultural assurances, which surround the ruminations on poetic fame and endurance, need first to be explored. Long Ago is a volume that, obviously enough, celebrates female creativity, quietly linking lyricism with a form of bisexual consciousness; it declares a territory of Classical studies, long a domain of male scholarly activity, as distinctively accessible to women and serviceable for the expression of female desire; it marks a fresh voice contesting with the l'art pour l'art assumptions of the end of the century; and it shares in its meditations on ending, loss, and time's passage a wider preoccupation of the fin de siècle with closing and dying.³

So much is clear. But it is also a volume that moves beyond those collective cultural interests. Long Ago imparts to ideas of termination, through its individual contemplation of the death of authors, a self-reflexive complexity uniquely its own, a personal resonance both intellectually intriguing and moving. The volume is a collection of poems that think hard about that which is threatened by history. Probing cultural deficit and historical decay, it mulls over ideas about survival which have, at their centre, a consideration of the poet(ess), her longevity, her fame, and the precious nature of her privacy which is Michael Field's alone. So focused on questions of survival is this collection that even its physical form exemplifies at a visual level a cluster of ideas about the persistence of antiquity and the possibilities of cheating oblivion, or, more accurately, of the illusion of such cheating that artifice might provide. Bound in marble-like vellum with an ancient image of Sappho in gold, Long Ago, as an artifact, appears corporeally to be a survival even if is not, hinting at one of its preoccupations with history's continuances through the enabling deception of a misleading appearance.⁴

Long Ago at the most obvious level is a volume attracted to lament. In its searching of questions about the communication between the modern world and the ancient, it figures emotional states that allow the firmest of bonds between one time and (an imagined version of) another. Seemingly predicated on a universalist sense of human emotions across history and cultures, Long Ago invites the reader to make empathetic recognitions in human dramas, sometimes divine dramas, that are imagined in the far distant past. The lament for Adonis, “XXV,”⁵

incorporates both that which marks out an ancient cultural environment – the religion of Aphrodite, the death of Adonis – and that which, in its grief for a lost love, invites the sorrowful sympathy of the present. The final poem, untitled, constructs a scene of communicative despair in a lament for the about-to-drown Sappho which, closing the volume with pity for the dead, makes a similar invitation. The dark pathos of “LXIII” arises from its representation of Sappho imagining what words she would declare from her deathbed. “IX” appeals for an affective response in representing the poet contemplating a lover she has lost. With such representations, Michael Field tests the capacity of the reader to be moved, empathetically to feel, across a sweep of human time. A. E. Housman, with a classical scholar's conception of antiquity, framed such empathetic connections with a reminder about the distance of the past and its disappearance. In the celebrated lyric “XXXI [On Wenlock Edge]” from A Shropshire Lad (1896), for instance, he seemed to invite the reader's recognition of a bond between the speaker and a fretful Roman of Caesar's empire only to curtail it by starkly acknowledging “To-day the Roman and his trouble / Are ashes under Uricon” (19–20) (Housman 21). Troubling imaginative sympathies, Housman left the reader with a blunt acknowledgement not of the past's proximity but of its obliteration. Michael Field explores affective communications across time that were less overtly challenged – but deftly problematized nonetheless. Their preoccupation with the possibility of felt relations between an imagined account of Sappho's ancient world and their own formed the background to Long Ago's broader exploration of other strands that connected, or seemed to connect, the age of Sappho with the nineteenth century.

Lament is self-evidently a concern of the volume, and loss preoccupies it. But Long Ago is also, beneath its elegiac temper, engaged with imaginative figurations of endurance, the return of the dead, and the possible failure of history to erase. Lillian Faderman is wrong to suggest that Michael Field's conversion to Catholicism was motivated simply by the fact that the religion “held out the hope of an afterlife” (211) where Katherine and Edith would be re-united. But Faderman would not have been wrong to point out that thoughts about overcoming death were crucial to them from the beginning of their collaboration. Sometimes, such consideration attains the form, indeed, of the most audacious of terrestrial emotional consolations: the promise – a reprise of that often-repeated scene in Classical literature – of a human being's return from the dead. Mary Sturgeon in her cagey preliminary study Michael Field (1922) remarked, with another perspective on their conversion, that “Not until [Michael Field] became Roman Catholics did they become optimists” (31)⁶

yet such a claim is predicated on too simple a model of their development and belies the seriousness of their pre-Catholic thinking about the terms and costs of hope. The final declaration of the Adonis lament in Long Ago turns to the mythic possibilities of seasonal cycles in an effort to lighten the gloom of bereavement: The endless sequence of possession and dispossession, love and departure, is at once a descriptor of universal tragedy, as inescapable as the movement from winter to spring, summer to autumn, and a form of rhetorical consolation, a reassurance that loss will always be followed by attainment, even if attainment is always followed by loss. The Adonis lament proposes a myth – its hero as the spring – that aspires to cheer through an enabling fiction of a lover's return. In so doing it intimates the place of deception in ideas of survival that the volume will, elsewhere, richly develop. “XXXVI” offers the same preoccupations in a new form: drawn to a material of alleged permanence that Sappho takes as a symbol of her unalterable desire, the lyric celebrates gold as a “hard, inviolable thing” (6), which, as the son of Zeus, seemingly cannot be destroyed. Gold is neatly made to represent, here, the nature of Sappho's love, claimed as “my immortal part” (11–12), indestructible, and never touched by the “finger of decay” (12). “VI” muses on a life that cannot be swallowed by death; it salutes the “Eternal youth” of Erinna and Sappho, the “ever fair” (4, 1). In such tropes, the volume articulates some of its diverse preoccupation with the possibilities of continuance and survival.

The sorrow of Long Ago comes in part from the contemplation of reassurance that exists in verbal forms, in heartening words alone, rather than in the firmer fabric of material reality. W. H. Auden would, with concision, close “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939) with a staged contradiction, leaving his reader to wonder what force and tone his words of apparent reassurance about the achievement of poetry possessed. Suggesting that the dead poet will, in “the prison of his days / Teach the free man how to praise” (Auden 198), Auden reflected ambivalently on the influence of poetry, allowing it to be that which heartens human beings, raising them beyond the incarceration of time, and that which encourages self-deception. Michael Field, interested too in the posthumous life of poetry and the nature of its assurances, eloquently offers not so much poetic statements that have the tension of contraries within them but an exploitation of the friction between an assertion in poetry and a reader's cognition of the world outside the page. Specifically, they allow the reader to sense the gap between confident statements of continuance beyond death, sure utterances about that which will survive, and the reader's intrusive sense of their fictivity, their basis in the illusory or transitory. Part of the pleasurable, decadent sadness of this volume is in such disillusionment. So much is perceived in Sappho's claim about her “eternal youth” (though it is true that Sappho is indeed remembered in the West only as a young woman) and in the promise of Adonis's return, but also, extensively, in the reflections on the immortality of the gods with whom Long Ago is widely intrigued. In the poems on divinities, a gap between claims about that which is seemingly permanent and the truth of loss they attempt to hide is prised wide open. “XLI” pitches an apparently confident statement about the durability of the divinities of ancient Greece into the end of nineteenth century. “Death is an evil,” the poem announces,

At once a plain declaration of restlessness with the persistence of death, the frisson of pain is found, as it often is in Long Ago, in the misalignment between the poem's announcement of the immortal nature of Greek divinity, the stout assurance of the gods’ security from death, and the moment of 1889; between the living faith of a once vibrant culture and the point at which it has become the antique, a far distant Other, barely known amid the priorities of the present and its convictions. John Ruskin, whom Katherine Bradley long admired,⁷ had audaciously said in The Queen of the Air (1869) that the recovery of Greek myths, their sincerity and moral truthfulness, was a necessity for the spiritual maturation of the modern world.⁸ Long Ago undertakes no Ruskinian project of the revival of veracities hidden in myths but, instead, delicately plays on the distances between the ancients and the present, the disturbing contemplation of certainties no longer certain, the conundrum of the dead immortals.

Amid its fascination with forms of permanence and loss, Long Ago is concerned with the nature of Sappho's own continuance, with the durability of her poetry and poetic fame, and with, more widely, the possibilities of living through followers and of cheating death through other poets' words. In contemplating the survival of Sappho and in discerning the potential of illusion to sustain it, Michael Field searches out an intriguing set of problems about literary endurance and figures their own aspirations for a distinction that is at once public yet secured against the intrusive eyes of the world. Algernon Charles Swinburne had provided in Poems and Ballads, First Series, a bold vocalization for Sappho, displacing the heterosexual writer of tradition with a passionate, sadistic lover of women. “Anactoria” exploits the monologue's ability – as had Robert Browning – to create an illusory version of the voices of the dead and, appropriately, figures Sappho not only as cruel lover but as a woman certain of her hold on posterity, of the ways in which her voice might endure in the imaginable domains of futurity. Anactoria would have been forgotten but for her lover's kisses that had branded her lips “with immortality” (203). But it is Sappho herself who, in Swinburne's monologue, believes she will be most radiantly remembered:

It is a strange, double form of endurance in which bitterness plays a part, in which knowledge of Sappho's songs leads to a compound state of being that is comprised both of joy and “much sadness.” Yet of her continuance in human history Sappho is, as Swinburne imagines her, convinced and he figures her transmission into futurity as a metamorphosis in which she becomes inescapably part of the ambience of existence, inseparable from the elements, the air, the wind, the sea, and all “high things.” Swinburne's meditations on the survival of art, its uncurtailable influence, and particularly on the possibilities of the poet's endurance beyond the grave through works, were to dominate his next collection, the Second Series, of Poems and Ballads (1878),⁹ but “Anactoria” would remain distinct as his most ample early expression of the surety of the artist's continuance through art.

Michael Field's explicit consideration of Sappho's longevity in both “LXIII” and the final poem of Long Ago, “O free me, for I take the leap,” together gently reposition Swinburne's text and open up its implicit questions about survival and the terms on which it is possible. The filigree lyricism of these poems is neither reducible to statement nor the clarity of monism but, cumulatively, Long Ago allows anxieties to be read in its textures, uncertainties to take verbal form, and penetrating questions delicately to coalesce. Where the final poem is spoken at the moment before Sappho's supposedly violent death, “LXIII” finds her constructing for herself a more tranquil end than history has traditionally accorded her. Addressed to a younger woman, it ventriloquizes a confidence in poetic immortality to be unexpectedly destabilized in the last stanza. The first two stanzas run as follows:

Apollo's presence behind the portal of death expresses Sappho's conviction in her own future place under the aegis of the god of poetry, her belief in a form of divine poetic immortality that awaits her (and, she confidently announces, all poets). Such a mood dominates the poem – but it is finally unsettled. “My child,” Sappho is made to say at the end, Sappho's assurance that she will not be forgotten is seemingly solid, but the paired rhyme words hint at trouble. Each chiming group sets two conflicting concepts of continuance versus loss, vitality versus the grave, against each other, holding them in uneasy balance – “thought … nought”; “obscure … endure”; “breath … death” – as if resisting the seductive power of Sappho's certainty in her own survival and the permanence of her dark-leaved laurels. But more ample doubtfulness is in the final words which close the poem with a taste of greater uncertainty, disturbing if not overthrowing its poise. Sappho may well mean “I shall walk in grandeur till my death [because I know my work will endure]” but that terminating collocation cannot help but suggest also that her grandeur will only continue “till my death [beyond which I will be, alas, reduced, diminished, fragmented].”

Long Ago, while allowing Sappho some (destabilized) confidence in the fact of her endurance, also permits the reader to acknowledge with open eyes that her work survives in the modern world in pieces, that the post-antique knows of her as wreckage. Where the volume gives to Sappho surety in the continuance of her deathless fame, it also stakes out the diminished condition in which her actual corpus of writing has been transmitted to the world, reminding the reader, at every stage, of her shattered canon through its opening quotations. Swinburne had examined a related issue about fractured legacies in 1878. His elegy for Baudelaire brought to the foreground anxieties about translation (from one language to another) and dispersal: forming a number of his own commemorative stanzas in “Ave Atque Vale: In Memory of Charles Baudelaire” from allusions to Les fleurs du mal (1857), Swinburne silently marked out, perhaps, the kinds of reconfigurations and diffusion that seemed inevitably to constitute Baudelaire's fate beyond the grave. Michael Field had other, more literal, fragments to contemplate. The broken shards of Sappho's poetry, surviving haphazardly as wrapping, detritus, and book bindings from the ancient world – Wharton thought there were 170 of them – provide starting points for Michael Field's new work but, in doing so, the volume acknowledges Sapphic durability as ironically inseparable from loss and transformation.¹⁰

In the final poem, Michael Field causes Sappho proleptically to hint at this changed condition, revealing a high point in the sensitivity of their lyrics to the problems of literary survival. Rewriting the Ovidian tradition of the heterosexual Sappho drowning herself for love, the poem re-imagines her final thoughts not as preoccupied with Phaon the ferryman but with Apollo the god of poetry and the possibilities of survival in posterity. They are words that simultaneously affirm the continuance that Long Ago explores and silently admit the transformations that Sappho, the originating female poet, will undergo in her existence beyond the watery tomb: The final stanza maps the condition of Sappho's persistence. The poet of Lesbos is right to think that men and women will remember her, and Long Ago is constructed, in some ways, to affirm it; yet she is also right in her half-apprehension, amid her hope for immortality, to guess that futurity will know her in a different shape – and it is this that Long Ago admits too. Aspiring to rebirth in a new form (and intriguingly a dumb one), Sappho offers a touching desire for freedom from the torment of human love, but also unobtrusively tropes the truth she cannot yet know: that a condition of her survival among men after her plunge into unfathomed seas is radical metamorphosis.

It is a transformation sharply apparent in Michael Field's handling of Sapphic reputation and one that invites questions not only about change as part of transmission but also, because of Long Ago's distinctive employment of Sappho's fragments to build new work, about illusion and deception. Margaret Reynolds applauds Michael Field's energy in making Sappho “real,” of “reconstructing” her in the nineteenth century, but she does not ponder more carefully the nature of their fabricating act (129). Michael Field's Sappho is not “real.” What is the cost, Long Ago silently asks, among its other searching questions, of imagining a poet's continuance, of supplanting what lingers of her in actuality with a feint, of lending her a voice not her own in a generous effort to celebrate her sustained vitality? Honoring Sappho's continuation by writing in her spirit and as if with her voice, Michael Field's impersonation is a practice of commemoration, a tribute to the power of the ancient writer, but also an act of duplicity. Taking Sappho's own lines as seeds for new poetry, Michael Field acknowledges her sustaining inspiration, the abiding power of her fascination, but, from the very energy of their discipleship, commit a poetic sleight of hand, creating out of their fertile minds an imagined, faked version of Sappho's words that betray the Greek's perhaps once actual hopes for continuance. Henry Wharton's edition of Sappho was, Michael Field said, a book of the “highest value” for those “who desire to obtain a vivid impression of the personality, the influence, and the environment of the poet” (130). It was a bizarrely erroneous statement for Wharton was conscious of the poverty of knowledge about Sappho the person. Yet the words are accidentally revealing of the imaginative purpose of Michael Field, for it was their volume that endeavored textually to explore a version of that allegedly “vivid” personality, so nearly lost to history. Long Ago was an imaginative venture that offered a figure both compelling and created; it was conscious of what was known of Sappho's real work through what seemed to Wharton the impenetrable “lapse of twenty-five centuries” (Wharton 1) and the producer of a chimera born of admiration.

In the Adonis lament, a myth of Adonis's return in the cyclical form of the seasons had attempted the work of consolation for the bereaved lover. In the physical appearance of Long Ago, a mirage of vellum and gold coyly suggested the perpetuation of Sappho's memory into the modern age and leant to the poems a deceptive proximity to antiquity. In “XLI,” the poet had taken reassurance in the impossibility of the gods' destruction even as the poem implicitly undermined the fact of their survival. Forms of illusion attempted to stave off the knowledge of loss and in so doing proved in miniature an emblem of a broader task of the volume as a whole as it offered, through a fictive version of Sappho's voice, the phantom of her remaining presence. The mirage of prosopopeia created the semblance of the survival of Sapphic personality – a “vivid impression” of the sort Wharton knew impossible – from before the birth of Jesus to the fin de siècle of the nineteenth century. Long Ago dealt with a fantasy of personality and in doing so invited questions about the extent to which a poet's admirers distort the integrity of the past. Yopie Prins, writing in Victorian Sappho (1999), remarks that the lyrics of Long Ago are “self-consciously nonoriginal, the textual copy of a voice not their own” (85) but in truth what is really challenging about the poems’ effort to create and sustain Sappho as personality is precisely their originality.

Long Ago undertakes a deft deception, partly problematic, partly enabling. Yet deception it is, and the volume remains irresolvably caught between an idea of ventriloquization as redemptory, as expressing the continued life of the dead, and a notion of speaking for others as a confidence trick.¹¹

“What I have aspired to do from Sappho's fragments,” Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper told Walter Pater, “may … somewhat appeal to your sense of survival in human things” (Evans 96) but it was an investigation of survival that left them, I think, dissatisfied. The meditation on literary endurance in Long Ago produced a vexation, a discomfort in Michael Field's apprehension of what tribute an admirer might pay to the works and words of the past, a puzzle about how the art of previous centuries might be able to speak to the present. It was by way of an initial response to this uncertainty that, shortly after Long Ago's publication, Michael Field re-orientated their concern with art's longevity and its continual capacity to have meaning to test out a new conception of art's transmission into futurity. Setting to one side their previous understanding of the survival of a creative force, the endurance of an artistic personality, they chose instead to concentrate in their next volume on the way in which an artifact, conceived as detached from an artist, might retain meaning across time. Their previous, post-Romantic engagement with personality was changed. Paterian aesthetics, the memorable directions of The Renaissance (1873), had insisted on the primacy of the observer in understanding the meaning of a work of art, re-articulating art experience in terms of consumption. Michael Field's Sight and Song (1892) resisted, to be sure, the full implications of this conception. In writing poems about works of art, Michael Field claimed that they were offering not personal, Paterian impressions – the volume consists of poems written in response to paintings – but more or less authentic accounts of what the “poetry” of those works was, what directly translatable, representable meanings they embodied. Michael Field did follow Pater, nonetheless, in accepting that such meanings were not associable with the creative intentions of artists. The link with personality was broken.

“The aim of this little volume,” Michael Field wrote in their Preface to Sight and Song, is

The most obvious feature of such a claim, as Ana I. Parejo Vadillo has discussed, is, indeed, its relation to Paterian principles.¹² But the Preface also speaks back to the intentions of Long Ago and its meditation on the survival of Sappho for in Sight and Song Bradley and Cooper save themselves from the problems of ventriloquization as a way of expressing the possibilities of an artist's survival. In leaving behind issues of the (re)creation of a historical voice and the recuperation of an ancient personality, they detach themselves also from the attendant difficulties of duplicity. Switching attention from concern with personality, they implicitly discard what Samuel Butler had made a guiding assumption that “art is only interesting in so far as it reveals an artist” (6) and invest in a notion of the “objective meaning” of a canvas. Such objective meaning was claimed as more or less wholly free from distortion by the mind of the observer, and that which could be known by posterity (a future that, though it no longer much matters in this personality-free conception of aesthetics, is far beyond the point of the artist's death). In recovering the apparently “objectively incarnate[d]” poetry of the visual arts from the great galleries of Europe, Michael Field commends a model for the way in which the aesthetic object can be understood as communicating into futurity and they offer a de-personalized conception of how the text, and what it says, eludes both the obliterating power of time and the warping agency of admirers.

Long Ago had celebrated an imagined version of Sappho. But if, at one level, the fabricated notion of this personality was troublesome and seemed to undermine the integrity of Michael Field's contemplation of her endurance, at another level it was a fantasy that hinted, perhaps, at some of Michael Field's own aspirations in terms of fame and survival at the end of the nineteenth century. This is the final gathering of ideas I want to suggest as of consequence in their contemplation of Sappho and the nature of authorship. In musing on a female poet (and a lover of women) who had maintained her presence, even if mythically, in centuries of human history, Michael Field, it might be possible to say (with a somewhat unproblematized equivalence), covertly expressed some of their own ambitions for poetic longevity. In imagining the indestructibility of Sappho, they could be thought as indirectly sketching out private aspirations for endurance and cultural visibility. Perhaps there is a little truth in such a view, and certainly, if Mary Sturgeon is to be believed, Michael Field regretted (though they also courted) their lack of prominence in the earlier years of their collaboration and their failure to be more widely acknowledged. That is not to say, however, that they did not at the same time complicate their relationship with fame by cultivating a fin-de-siècle coterie image however much they appeared to hope for celebrity, limiting the publication runs of their high-production-cost texts to small numbers (Long Ago was issued in only 100 copies) and remaining outside public literary circles. But a more complex set of personal interests, I think, may also have been tangled up in the figure that Long Ago created for Sappho who is perhaps obliquely expressive of other – and more interesting – autobiographical impulses about the nature of composite authorship and the relationship between writing and public disclosure.

Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper insisted on Michael Field's separate existence: the name signified not a pseudonym simply to disguise their identities within a male-dominated market – Angela Leighton is misleading in implying this (202–03) – but a sign of the new individual Bradley and Cooper believed themselves to become in their act of collaborative writing. It was a separate identity they defended against disclosure and about the nature of Michael Field they periodically theorized, figuring their “double singleness” by imagining themselves in tropes of intermingling clouds of summer flies, as a new Beaumont and Fletcher (Moore 3),¹³

and as “closer married” (Moore 16) in their poetic relationship than Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. The persona was, as has been well-established, an expression of their almost mystical unity and a statement that, in public, they were not the private Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper. Personality as articulated in lyric poetry – the poetry of the confessing “I” – becomes, in this model, a matter of great complexity as the “I” is refracted into plurality, or, as Yopie Prins has usefully phrased it (though she does not need to introduce an issue of gender), the “act of writing … defers identity and [signifies] the impossibility of a single, self-authorizing, self-present feminine subject” (82). The multiple nature of Bradley and Cooper's authorship seems yet further complicated – as various critics have acknowledged – by their ventriloquization of Sappho in Long Ago, decisively forbidding the sense of a unitary intention guiding the meaning of the verse.¹⁴ But, from another perspective, the fabrication of Sappho in Michael Field's inaugural volume is an act that suggests through the ancient poetess a model for Michael Field's authorship in a way that clarifies rather than complicates. The imagined figure of the nearly lost poetess of Lesbos, implied by the traces of her miraculously surviving fragments, offers a model of personality that is at once convincing – a credible public figura – and fictive; she is simultaneously persuasive and constructed. Sappho in Long Ago is a created poet, a presence that is moving, confessional, “autobiographical,” powerful – and illusory. As such, she delicately enacts something of Bradley and Cooper's own procedure as they transformed their individualities into a mask.

In Long Ago's fabricated poet is also to be glimpsed a paradigm of fame, an idea of literary renown, perhaps peculiarly comprehensible and acceptable, in its paradoxical nature, to Michael Field. Not only is the shape of Sappho in Long Ago influenced by the distinctive nature of the Bradley and Cooper's conception of writing as an enterprise built from a persona but Sappho also models the kind of protectiveness with which Michael Field treated their individualities secreted behind their public name. Bette London aptly observes that the pseudonym “sheltered and expressed” the union of the two writers but she does not consider how much of significance there is in her first term (67). Sapphic renown is a matter of recognition and celebration but it does not, in Long Ago, occur at the cost of the exposure of self, the public uncovering of personality, or the disturbing loss of privacy that was becoming, as Henry James fretfully acknowledged, a disquieting condition of fame at the end of century.¹⁴ The Sappho of Long Ago is at once a personality open to scrutiny – her desires, passions, anxieties, pleasures are available to view – but, in her state as imagined being, also protected, guarded against intrusive eyes, shielded from exposure, so that, in yet another way, Long Ago suggests how fiction may facilitate.¹⁵

An unnoticed distinctiveness of Long Ago is that, in staging Sappho as a writer who maintains both public presence and privacy, the volume dramatizes, despite its ancient subject matter, a modern authorial desire to hold on both to cultural visibility and private identity. The subterraneous aspirations of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper as they confronted the demands of a public life of letters in 1889 are surreptitiously narrativized in a volume, which, conjuring a lyric poet saved from the biographer, acts out their stance on literary exposure and offers a kind of apologia, an implicit justification, for why they fashioned their authorial persona as they did. Long Ago is a sustained consideration of the meaning and costs of an artist's life in posterity; it is a volume that in different ways inspects the role of deception in consolation and in memorializing the artist's survival; it is imaginatively preoccupied with an idea of enduring through a persona. It is also a text that is eloquently revealing of its authors’ anxieties, paradoxically enough, about self-revelation.