of their secret, she pleaded, 'would indeed be utter ruin to us,' adding, 'We have many things to say that the world will not tolerate from a woman's lips.'
Katharine Harris Bradley lost her father, a tobacco manufacturer, when she was two and her mother when she was twenty-two. After her mother's death Bradley attended Newnham College, the newly established women's college at Cambridge, and the College de France in Paris. On her return home she joined John Ruskin's Guild of Saint George, a small Utopia n society. When Bradley wrote to Ruskin telling him that she had lost God and found a Skye terrier, he angrily ended their friendship. Shortly thereafter she began attending classes at Bristol University with her niece,
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163 8 / MICHAEL FIELD
Edith Emma Cooper, whom she had adopted and raised after Edith's mother became ill. The two became lovers and began a life of writing and traveling together. Their first joint volume of poetry, Long Ago (1889), was inspired by Henry Wharton's 1885 edition of the writings of the ancient Greek poet Sappho, the first English translation to represent the object of Sappho's love poems as a woman. The preface to Long Ago explains their attempt to create poems elaborating on Sappho's fragments: 'Devoutly as the fiery-bosomed Greek turned in her anguish to Aphrodite to accomplish her heart's desires, I have turned to the one woman who has dared to speak unfalteringly of the fearful mastery of love.'
Bradley and Cooper knew most of the literary figures of the nineties, including Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats, although their relationship to the decadent movement was complex. The eroticism of their early poetry, with its frank expression of love between women, seems consistent with the spirit of the decade; but Bradley and Cooper sharply criticized the work of the artist Aubrey Beardsley for its depravity and withdrew one of their poems from publication in The Yellow Book to protest its style (Beardsley was the journal's art editor). In 1906 they converted to Boman Catholicism when their beloved chow dog died, thus reversing the substitution of dog for God that Bradley had flippantly described to Buskin three decades earlier. In 1911 Cooper was diagnosed with cancer. Suffering too from cancer, which she kept a secret from Cooper to spare her pain, Bradley survived her niece by only eight months.
[Maids, not to you my mind doth change]
Talg KaXaig i/x/iiv [TO] vorj/ia TW/XOV oi) dia/ietTiTov.'
Maids, not to you my mind doth change;
Men I defy, allure, estrange,
Prostrate, make bond or free:
Soft as the stream beneath the plane0 tree
s To you I sing my love's refrain;
Between us is no thought of pain,
Peril, satiety.
Soon doth a lover's patience tire,
But ye to manifold desire
io Can yield response, ye know
When for long, museful days I pine,
The presage at my heart divine;
To you I never breathe a sign
Of inward want or woe.
15 When injuries my spirit bruise,
Allaying virtue ye infuse
With unobtrusive skill:
And if care frets ye come to me
As fresh as nymph from stream or tree,
20 And with your soft vitality
My weary bosom fill.
1. A fragment from the works of the Greek poet Sappho (born ca. 612 B.C.E.); the epigraph is translated in the first line of the poem.
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[IT WAS DEEP APRIL, AND THE MORN] / 163 9
[A girl] 510A girl, Her soul a deep-wave pearl Dim, lucent of all lovely mysteries; A face flowered for heart's ease, A brow's grace soft as seas Seen through faint forest-trees: A mouth, the lips apart, Like aspen-leaflets trembling in the breeze From her tempestuous heart. Such: and our souls so knit, I leave a page half-writ? The work begun Will be to heaven's conception done, If she come to it. 1893 Unbosoming 5ioisThe love that breeds In my heart for thee! As the iris is full, brimful of seeds, And all that it flowered for among the reeds Is packed in a thousand vermilion-beads That push, and riot, and squeeze, and clip,0Till they burst the sides of the silver scrip,0And at last we see What the bloom, with its tremulous, bowery fold Of zephyr-petal at heart did hold: So my breast is rent With the burthen and strain of its great content; For the summer of fragrance and sighs is dead, The harvest-secret is burning red, And I would give thee, after my kind, The final issues of heart and mind. clutch purse 1893 [It was deep April, and the morn] 5It was deep April, and the morn Shakspere was born;1 The world was on us, pressing sore; My Love and I took hands and swore, Against the world, to be
I. Shakespeare's birthday conventionally is given as April 23, 1564.
