This chapter focuses the entangled relationship between the beginnings of Michael Field scholarship in the 1990s and the rise of queer studies in the same period. The chapter connects Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s queerness not only to their lesbian partnership but also to the incestual dimension of their relationship. The chapter then focuses on what Michael Field can teach us about queer friendships, especially through their relations with Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, about queer marriage, domesticity, and concepts of the queer ordinary/queer normalcy.

Michael Field and Oscar Wilde moved in overlapping cultural and social circles from the mid-1880s to his imprisonment in May 1895. Their mutual acquaintances included Bernard Berenson, John Gray, Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon, Robert Ross, and William Rothenstein. Bradley was eager to befriend Wilde at one of Louise Chandler Moulton’s ‘at-homes’ in 1890. In 1891, the coauthors paid a visit to Wilde’s family residence. Later, they sought his advice on their only staged drama, A Question of Memory (1893). They maintained, too, a strong interest in Wilde’s comedies. Still, Bradley, Cooper, and Wilde never became close friends. Nonetheless, after Wilde’s demise in late 1900, Michael Field respected his legacy, attending the double bill of Salome and A Florentine Tragedy in 1906, choosing to remember him positively.