Written over, for the far time to discover – materiality and taste in the archives of Michael Field

Michael Field is the pseudonym of a collaborative writing partnership between two Victorian women, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who developed a practice which they regarded as both a physical and spiritual marriage. I have been invited to produce a body of practice-based comics research responding to the archives of Michael Field as a Visiting Artist Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. Field’s practice represents an anachronistic reworking of Elizabethan verse on the one hand, and a radical queer intersubjective life writing practice on the other. Their life combined fraught attempts to recreate Victorian matrimonial domesticity, with a bohemian urge to reimagine society within a burgeoning suburbia. This paper will consider how these tensions manifest themselves through the materiality of Field’s photographs, journals, letters, and scrapbooks in the context of Victorian ideas of taste and convention. I will present my project in progress, reflecting on how I have used comics’ visual register to translate archival materiality into a narrative form in a way that effectively communicates aesthetic factors relating to taste and fashion. Reflection on the technologies remediating this materiality will produce insights into the process of memory-making embedded in the societal power structures from which ideas of taste emerge.