In this article, I propose a new reading of Michael Field ’s Long Ago (1889) focused on explaining how this volume of verse appropriates the figure of Sappho, rewrites her failed romance with Phaon, and amplifies her archetypal image of tragic lover through a mythopoetic narrative that refashions different classical myths of desire, despair and death. I present all these myths jointly, discuss their assonances with the Sapphic archetype, and reveal how they constitute a coherent and elaborate mythography that portrays Sappho as a tragic heroine who, through the power of myth, embodies a universal paradigm of human affectivity.
This article offers a close reading of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s lyric III in Long Ago, a Sapphic volume of verse published in 1889 under the collaborative nom de plume of Michael Field. This collection articulates a dramatic inquiry into the tragedy of unrequited love in a long cycle of lyrics whose third piece most effectively encapsulates the kernel of what the Fields reconstruct as Sappho’s ambivalent eroticism. The outcome of this reconstruction, as analysed in light of lyric III, is a consistent Hegelian view of desire that subsumes a complex system of tropes, myths, paradoxes and imaginative strategies under an overarching ideology of desire as a radical experience of appropriation, violence and self-destruction.
The purpose of this paper is to examine how Katharine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper reinterpret the figure of Sappho in direct connection with the myth of Eros in Long Ago (1889), their first volume of lyrics written under the pen name of Michael Field. To this end, I select a series of poems addressed to the Greek deity of love, offer a close reading thereof, and prove that the Fields compose a dramatic mythography that explores the god's paradoxical identity and, in so doing, reveals a timeless truth contained in the very essence of the Eros myth: love is an ambivalent phenomenon that creates, inspires and elevates as much as it destroys, oppresses, and kills.
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