The digitization of Michael Field’s diary is a scholarly community project, supported by a team led and funded by a consortium of scholars and universities, including Dartmouth College and King’s College London. We are a group of students, scholars, readers, and professors, and we range from scholarly experts in nineteenth-century literature to interested novices. Our shared work is a pilot and a work in progress. Teams from around the globe have undertaken the painstaking work of transcribing the diary’s manuscript pages. We will update this site as transcribed volumes pass peer review. A new phase of development of the site is planned for 2022, and more transcription and editorial notes will be added at and after that point. We will continue to increase the functionality of the site.
As a user of this resource, you are part of our community; we welcome you, and we are pleased to offer this work in progress to you. In return we ask you to help us improve it by emailing any corrections or additional information to us at Michael.Field.Diary@gmail.com. Thank you for visiting, and thank you for being part of the project.
Contact us: You can reach the project manager, Dawn Dumpert, at Michael.Field.Diary@gmail.com.
All use of this site must be acknowledged in your citations. Add the following text to the end of your standard reference note and/or bibliographical entry: "Accessed via [URL here]"
Copyright of the diaries is held by the Michael Field estate (Leonie Sturge-Moore and Charmian O'Neil). The diaries are reproduced with kind permission of the Michael Field estate. The diaries have been digitized by the British Library in partnership with New York University, and the images are made online with permission of the Library.
No permission is given for reproduction of these images outside of this site, and permission for use of the images (academic or otherwise) must be sought from the copyright holders.
The ‘transcription status’ bar featured on every page indicates the level of editorial review the transcription and editorial notes have received.
* checked by the volume lead only
** checked by a member of the editorial board
*** complete
[E.C.] and [K.B.] are used at the head of the passage to indicate whether the passage is in the hand of Edith Cooper or Katharine Bradley. [T.S.M.] indicates the hand of Thomas Sturge Moore, the women’s literary executor and the first editor of the diaries.
Illegible Words: [????]
Words about which the transcriber is unsure, so I think this word might be testimony: [testimony?]
[<] and [>] surround text added or inserted to an existing line by the authors
Words with strikethrough indicate crossed out material in the MS.
The poets, dramatists, and diarists Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913) were not only aunt and niece, but also long-term partners who wrote collaboratively under the composite name ‘Michael Field’. Michael Field published prolifically—particularly collections of lyric poetry and historical verse-dramas—finding success with the early works in the 1880s and winning new-found fame in recent times primarily with the poetry. However, perhaps their most fascinating document is the diary, intended for posthumous publication, that Bradley and Cooper co-wrote to record their lives and literary endeavors. Titled Works and Days, the diary unfolds from 1888 until their deaths: Cooper’s in 1913; Bradley’s in 1914, days after the outbreak of World War I. Michael Field’s literary executor, Thomas Sturge Moore, published a vastly expurgated volume of diary extracts in 1933. The full manuscript diary is housed in the archives of the British Library and has never been fully transcribed; it is thus relatively inaccessible to anyone other than the dedicated scholar. Yet it contains much to intrigue researchers and general readers alike. In addition to Michael Field’s own aesthetic responses to events both contemporaneous and historically resonant, Works and Days offers a powerful historical testimony of the construction of a queer identity through the formation of Michael Field’s aesthetic paganism, their conversion to Catholicism, and, finally, through the pathos of Cooper’s death. It also tells the narrative of their close, if often tempestuous, relationships with John Ruskin, Robert Browning, and Bernhard Berenson; and their chronicle of the cultural life of fin-de-siècle London and Europe, detailing encounters with the leading literary and artistic figures of the period, including Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Walter Pater. The writing is powerful, caustic, and witty; and ultimately intensely moving.
The scanning of the complete diary of Michael Field was made possible with the support of New York University and the British Library. The platform was originally built and hosted by the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of South Carolina. In June 2021, responsibility for the site transferred to Dartmouth College (MichaelFieldDiary.dartmouth.edu). Generous support for the transfer came from the Leslie Center for the Humanities; the Department of English and Creative Writing; and the faculty cluster on digital humanities and social justice, all at Dartmouth College. The National Endowment for the Humanities has provided support for the development of crowdsourcing strategies through the Building Better Communities for Crowdsourced Transcription Institute.
Sincere thanks to the Development Teams from Dartmouth College and the University of South Carolina for their work on the technical build.