The preface considers why historical context is such a rich and complicated lens through which to approach Michael Field and their work, given the complexity of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s lives and collaborative identity as Michael Field, and the startling range of past historical periods with which their work engaged, including Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Renaissance Italy, among other periods. The Preface approaches Michael Field as firmly situated within the cultures of the fin de siècle or 1890s, and discusses how their work develops in the twentieth century or modernist era. Finally, the Preface approaches the more difficult aspects of Michael Field’s identity, addressing issues of gender, sexuality, and the incestual dimension of Bradley and Cooper’s relationship.

This chapter considers Michael Field’s collaborative authorship, focusing on the tension between singularity and plurality in their shared authorial identity. It explores Michael Field’s pseudonymous collaboration as a constant negotiation between multiple voices that radically revises conceptions of both life-writing and verse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter surveys Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s shared diary Works and Days and their poems, such as ‘A girl’ to show how they generate a sense of unison in their work, in the process achieving a fluid negotiation between different voices.

This chapter argues that Michael Field was not just a pseudonym but also an imaginative construct that enabled Bradley and Cooper’s poetic output. It is productive to compare the Michael Field persona to poetry: both are creative genres with specific formal properties and communicative modes. Bradley and Cooper revised inherited literary forms in their reimagined verse dramas, sonnets, masques, and Elizabethan-style songs. Similarly, Bradley and Cooper remake inherited identity categories and reform subjectivity in creating a masculine singular avatar. Playing with form is a way for Bradley and Cooper to express what they think and feel, as well as who they are. This chapter addresses why Bradley and Cooper created an alternate artistic identity, how their pseudonyms evolved to become Michael Field, and the ways in which understanding Bradley and Cooper’s carefully constructed poetic persona can help scholars and readers understand their ideas about gender, sex, art, identity, and autonomy.

The chapter outlines the biographical context of 1848, when Denmark underwent a revolution and its Church was reconstituted. In 1848 Kierkegaard felt himself at a turning point in his own life: He was looking back at his difficult childhood and Christian upbringing and considering his professional future. The same year was also a turning point in his relationship to the Danish State Church and its head, Bishop Mynster. Having declared an end to his authorship, Kierkegaard was trying to decide how to express his developing views and how far he should go in his critique of the Church. From a literary point of view, The Sickness unto Death signaled the increasing prominence of the genre of the religious discourse, while from a theological point of view it shows Kierkegaard drawing closer to the ideal of imitating Christ. At the same time, The Sickness unto Death presents his mature philosophical position, in continuity with his earlier works, consolidated in his analysis of the human being’s spiritual condition and the ideal of faith as “resting transparently in God.” The personal, philosophical, and professional questions underlying The Sickness unto Death caused a long delay in its publication; these questions were eventually resolved by the invention of a new pseudonym, Anti-Climacus.