‘The Eyes of an Intellectual Vampire’: Michael Field, Vernon Lee and Female Masculinities in Late Victorian Aestheticism

Abstract

In April 1895, Michael Field – the joint name of the couple Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper – set off for Italy to stay with the art historians Bernard Berenson and Mary Costelloe.¹ Arriving in Fiesole, however, they found the pair on the verge of departing, leaving the Fields unexpectedly alone for the first half of their stay. The couple occupied themselves with trips to museums in Florence and study of Berenson’s photographic collection, aided by Maud Cruttwell, then Berenson’s housekeeper but an emerging art historian in her own right.² One morning the Fields, accompanied by Cruttwell, walked across the countryside to pay a visit to Il Palmerino, the Tuscan residence of the writer Vernon Lee. Bradley was reluctant to discuss details of the trip in a subsequent letter to Costelloe, hinting at its failure, ‘We went to Vernon Lee yesterday . . . I will remark with regard to that visit that the deep tonic of the orange jam is a thing to remember’.³ In the couple’s shared journal Works & Days, however, both Bradley and Cooper dwelt on the day at length. As Cooper recalled, the group walked to the villa through a landscape coloured by the past: ‘we passed the stream where Boccaccio + his ladies sat in the coolness + told their tale’, a fiction seemingly extended by Lee, who appeared as a ‘gaunt Sibyl’ in somewhat incongruous clothing.⁴ The entry lingers over Lee’s appearance, an object of apparent curiosity and revulsion. Lee has disconcertingly ‘ghostly’ and ‘restless’ features.⁵ Cooper’s text presents Lee as inexplicably tragic, with ‘much suffering in the expression, a sadness that one pities’.⁶ Most strikingly, Lee’s eyes seem to betray something monstrous: ‘The eyes with a look of greed for discussion, the eyes of an intellectual Vampire’.⁷ The description is as startling as it is humorous. Why do the Fields portray Lee as a vampire? This article suggests that metaphors like the vampire provided a means to stage troubled gender relations at the end of the nineteenth century. Building on work that has pointed to the existence of non-normative masculinities in the late Victorian period, it argues that decadent writers such as the Fields drew on an existing rhetoric of aesthetic masculinity in order to articulate gender differences between themselves and other female-bodied aesthetes.⁸

The fashioning of Victorian masculinities has long been a subject of interest.⁹ Thaïs Morgan has shown how male aesthetes ‘re-imagined masculinity’ in the 1860s, whilst James Eli Adams, in his pioneering monograph Dandies and Desert Saints, argued for the existence of various ‘styles’ of masculinity in the period, many of which enjoyed currency well into the 1890s.¹⁰ This article considers authors writing in the latter period, who looked to an earlier tradition of male aestheticism and reconfigured its central themes according to new, gender-diverse terms. Sarah Parker has described the ‘interpenetration of male and female influences’ in fin-de-siècle writing, whilst Richard Dellamora has suggested that male and female cultural dissidence was ‘mutually constitutive’ in the period.¹¹ Rather than normalizing a binary between female and male aesthetes, this article argues for attention to the occasional and strategic recourse to masculinities, that allowed authors to articulate allegiances to an aestheticist tradition from which they might otherwise have been excluded.¹² The article begins by examining the claim to an intellectual legacy implicit in the characterization of Lee as an ‘intellectual vampire’ and then moves to consider the Fields’ anxiety over so-called masculine women in relation to their own gender-variant lives.

Masculinity was a contested site for female aesthetes, at a time when the press was loudly decrying the masculinization of women through the satirized figure of the New Woman.¹³ Whilst the history of aestheticism has traditionally been written from the perspective of the male aesthete, the groundbreaking work of Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades has brought increasing attention to the role of female aesthetes in articulating difference within Victorian culture.¹⁴ The history of aestheticism has expanded considerably in the course of this revaluation, revealing an eclectic movement embroiled in topical issues of gender, sexuality and social reform.¹⁵ Nevertheless, as Stefano Evangelista has shown, whilst connections between aestheticism and emergent male homosexual subcultures have been clearly established, female aestheticism remains an ambiguous and contested space.¹⁶ This has been particularly evident in the struggle to reconcile aestheticism in its final, ‘Decadent’ stages with the emerging figure of the New Woman, a debate in which Vernon Lee, with her socially engaged aestheticism, has held centre stage.¹⁷ An investigation into the co-existence of female masculinities helps to reframe this problem. Whilst the press parodied the idea of the masculine woman, it is also clear, as Heike Bauer has suggested, that some women strategically embraced masculinity.¹⁸ Rather than see female masculinity as a fixed or stable identity, it might be better understood in this instance as a rhetorical construction that self-consciously borrowed figural tropes from an earlier generation of male aesthetes, often employing them to point to difference between proximate gender and sexual identities.¹⁹ On 27 May 1892, the Fields wrote a now frequently cited diary entry:

Mrs C spoke of the freedom that was breaking round womanhood – she spoke of things new, while the old oaks nodded . . . I told her I should never fight for any freedom to gain wh. would perturb my art. I have only so much energy – if the god demands it – the cause of womanhood must go hang!²⁰

Sarah Parker has shown that while this passage has been used to demonstrate the couple’s commitment to the archetypal aesthete – the male dandy – an investigation of the correspondence between the Fields and ‘Mrs C’ (Mary Costelloe) reveals a neglected female literary network based in Fiesole.²¹ This article reconsiders this network through the eyes of the Fields on their trip to Italy in 1895, when they were in close contact with Lee, her partner Clementina (‘Kit’) Anstruther-Thomson and Cruttwell. Taking place just before the public denouncement of aestheticism following the trial of Oscar Wilde, but after the deaths of leading aesthetic figures J. A. Symonds and Walter Pater in 1893 and 1894 respectively, the Italian trip offers a view onto a fleeting moment in which the legacy of aestheticism appeared newly negotiable. An examination of the Fields’ responses to these three queer writers questions any community between the group simply as a result of their shared categorical status as sexual dissidents and women writers.

Michael Field and Lee in particular provide ideal comparative studies, since at first glance they appear so alike. Sapphists who used male pseudonyms in public and private, they inhabited similar, even overlapping, cultural circles in Italy and England and both experimented in a range of genres that pulled apart the boundaries of historical and art historical fiction.²² The Fields were known as poets and dramatists and Lee as an essayist, but their attitudes towards the uses and practice of history reveal many convergences. Mentored by leading figures of aestheticism such as Walter Pater, and up to date with the latest European publications in fiction and scholarship, they wrote on a similar set of historical periods, namely antiquity, the early Italian Renaissance and the Elizabethan period.²³ Lee and the Fields took up these cultures to probe the possibility of cultural afterlife, frequently employing the gothic to explain a supernatural recourse to the past. As Dustin Friedman has argued, aesthetes used the past to inhabit various forms of queer subjectivities, permitting them to express selfhoods unacceptable within Victorian culture.²⁴ In the fantasy of these imagined pasts, Lee and the Fields were able to rework received boundaries of gender identity and expression. In Lee’s fantastical tales, gathered together in 1890 in Hauntings and in 1904 in Pope Jacynth, and Other Fantastic Tales, the limits of human and gendered identity are repeatedly called into question through themes such as non-human agency and interspecies desire.²⁵ The Fields looked especially to the Sapphic past, most notably in their poetic reworking of the Sappho fragments in Long Ago (1888).²⁶ Both repeatedly took the imagined life of artworks as the basis for their historical reinventions, ascribing gothic animacies to artworks that enable their interference in the contemporary realm.²⁷ In Lee’s short story Oke of Okehurst, a haunted picture exerts a strange thrall over a living ancestor, whilst in the Fields’ diary, an androgynous Italian tomb sculpture uncannily wakes up and speaks to Cooper in a dream.²⁸

The revival of the gothic in 1890s writing has been the subject of extensive critical commentary.²⁹ Work on Florence Marryat’s Blood of the Vampire (1897) has shown how some female writers used the vampire, laced with homoerotic undertones, to explore anxieties over the changing role of women in the public sphere.³⁰ With the introduction of the female vampire into the literary and popular imagination, the blood-sucking figure became a metaphor for, or articulation of, same-sex desire amongst women.³¹ This desire, unlike its postmodern form in which ‘the vampire is the queer in its lesbian mode’, was figured in the fearful sense that unreproductive lesbianism was a kind of vampirism.³² Richard Dyer, in a masterful study of the vampire, questioned the existence of any lesbian-produced lesbian-vampire tradition prior to the lesbian gothic imagined in Djuna Barnes’ 1936 Nightwood.³³ As he notes, while the nineteenth century enjoyed plenty of lesbian vampire figures, they are all framed from a heterosexual or masculine perspective, as in Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla (1872).³⁴ The Fields’ sketch of Lee, however, points to an extraordinary rendition of the lesbian gothic as early as the 1890s.

The vampire was a well-established figure in aesthetic writing, most famously in Walter Pater’s description of the Mona Lisa as ‘older than the rocks on which she sits. Like the vampire, she has been dead many times’.³⁵ Like the Fields’ singling out of Lee’s eyes, Pater had also focused on the gaze, or more specifically on the ‘eyelids’ of the vampire, a gothic fragmentation that the Fields use elsewhere in the diaries.³⁶ By evoking this infamous passage of Pater, the Fields appear to play with the conceit that Lee, the aesthetic critic, was bound up perversely with the object of her study, the Renaissance. Modelled on the Paterian technique in which ‘aesthetic understanding comes to be understood on the model of intimate knowledge of another person’, the representation of Lee as a vampire both claims access to the inner life of Lee and establishes a link to cultural authority through its connection with a tradition of aesthetic writing.³⁷ Like the vampire, Lee thirsts for substance, only now the substance is knowledge, with her eyes that ‘have a look of greed for discussion’. Lee’s purported vampirism thus takes up a central – if evasive – premise of aestheticism: that knowledge is a kind of desire, a premise likewise identified by Evangelista in Pater’s writings in which ‘sexual desire is deliberately confused with the desire to know’.³⁸ As James Eli Adams outlines, Pater not only describes but reproduces the erotic fascination of the object through his spectral descriptions of Leonardo’s painted figures. Cooper employed similar terms elsewhere in the diary to describe her own gaze when she reflected on a ‘strange letter of praise’ from Berenson in which he claimed he ‘covet[s]’ her presence before pictures, since she is able to ‘suck out the soul of a picture’.³⁹ With repeated descriptions of hunger, the diary seems to visualize the process of aesthetic appreciation through the bodily act of vampirism.

Lee had also pointed to the links between aesthetic and corporeal consumption in her novel Miss Brown, published in 1884 to mixed reviews.⁴⁰ The plot centres around the discovery of the beautiful Anne Brown in Italy by the pre-eminent aesthetic painter Walter Hamlin, who removes Anne from her position as servant to reform and educate her. Psomiades has argued that the novel presents aestheticism as a form of vampirism, an ‘erotic theft’ that sustains itself on the bodies of women.⁴¹ As Psomiades demonstrates, however, Lee nevertheless made use of these same aesthetic strategies in order to articulate same-sex desire.⁴² Sacha, the cousin of Walter and described by one reviewer as ‘a study of morbid anatomy’, is presented as the archetypal vampire, touching Anne with ‘the caress of a lamia’s clammy scales’.⁴³ Sacha is like the femme fatale of a decadent poetics, a trope re-invented by the Fields through their explicit reworking of Pater’s vampiric Mona Lisa in an ekphrastic poem from 1892 simply entitled ‘La Gioconda’.⁴⁴ Across these texts, the vampire metaphor shapes intellectual ownership as a form of perverse desiring. Whilst the comparison with the vampire is a critical one, desire nonetheless slips through in the form of an ambiguously lingering touch and gaze.⁴⁵

On a second visit to Il Palmerino, Lee is recorded again in the diary as a ‘poor intellectual vampire disappointed of her discussion’.⁴⁶ The recurrence of the phrase ‘intellectual vampire’ underlines the significance of the diary as a site for the accretion of repeated tropes and ideas, rather than an outlet for spontaneous writing. The casting of Lee as a parasite was also echoed in the reminiscences of male writers, such as those by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was present at the second visit with the Fields: ‘she has a whole series of young girls to whom she was a vampire . . . she sapped their life and their energy’.⁴⁷ Berenson had also hinted at something similar, recording indignantly in a letter to Costelloe how he had been treated as a mere guide in a meeting with Lee at the Uffizi and paraphrasing Lee’s thoughts to consider himself as ‘a man she thinks who has done all the dirty work, all the unskilled labour. Let me use my real intelligence in exploiting him’.⁴⁸ In both instances, Lee is presented as something unnatural, a creature who sustains her intellect through exploitation of others’ knowledge.

The Fields, however, recognized Lee’s intellectual aptitude. She is, the diary concedes, extremely well informed and possesses a remarkable memory. Yet the Fields also suggest there is something amiss in the use of all this knowledge, since it does not in fact ‘serve an able mind’.⁴⁹ Instead, Lee is merely a storehouse: ‘she is like a museum, rather untidily arranged’.⁵⁰ Within aestheticism’s economy of knowledge, therefore, Lee is only a bearer of second-knowledge. Unlike the discerning individual of Pater’s aesthetics, Lee is presented as a consumer of substance. Like the vampire, she cannot produce the thing she most craves, a cultivated sensibility for the appreciation of artworks, as ‘Vernon was very stupid in what she said about Art’.⁵¹ This vampire is a twist on the familiar nineteenth-century image of the blood-sucking creature as a metaphor for the accumulation of capital.⁵² The Fields had no investment in a theory of capital, but they do play on its terms, so that Lee the vampire becomes a monstrous reformulation of aestheticism’s object.⁵³

The figure of the vampire as used by the Fields points to a central conflict in the legacy of queer aesthetic masculinity: a conflict over the proper form of knowledge and its acquisition through scholarship. A diary entry in 1890 explains that:

the whole problem of life turns on pleasure. Pater shows that the hedonist – the perfected hedonist is the saint . . . there was one sentence of Mr. Pater’s wh: I would not say I could forgive, because I recognised its justice; but from wh. I suffered – or wh. was hard to bear – that in wh. he speaks of the scholarly conscience as male⁵⁴

Might the discomfort that the Fields felt towards Lee have been a problem of the gendered order of the ‘scholarly conscience’? This is perhaps surprising, considering the Fields’ adoption of a male persona for their published works. Writing to Cooper about the Athenaeum’s review of Father’s Tragedy in 1880, Bradley exclaimed ‘Well, Pussie, dear Elizabeth man I congratulate you; but what I am chiefly pleased to learn is that I am more vigorous than Pussie!!! – the male part of Michael as beseemeth our relations’.⁵⁵ In 1890, after their exposé by Bradley’s mentor Robert Browning, they even wrote to Lee on the importance of their double male identity:

It cannot be too frequently repeated, that belief in the unity of M.F. is absolutely necessary, alike for the advance of his glory & his attaining his favour. He is in literature one . . . even public reference to him should be masculine. But need scarcely warn Vernon Lee on this point?⁵⁶

Lee, however, evidently did need warning. A few weeks later she wrote contemptuously to her mother, Matilda Paget, about the Fields’ insistence on a double identity, ‘this dualism is a pathetic instance of the self importance of the literary worm which always imagines the eye of the world fixed upon its precious wrigglings’.⁵⁷ If the Fields were looking for sympathy from Lee, or any of the ‘comradeship of outlawed thought’ that Lee identified in other aesthetic figures, then they did not receive it.⁵⁸ There were, however, undeniable similarities in the reception of their work. Both the Fields and Lee feared that their work would not be taken seriously if it were fronted by a female presenting name, Lee fretting that ‘I am sure that no one reads a woman’s writing on art, history or aesthetics with anything but unmitigated contempt’.⁵⁹ There was good reason to be cautious about a gendered reputation: J. A. Symonds, for instance, was mistrustful of Lee for precisely this reason, loath to treat her as a colleague and keeping her permanently in the position of the aspiring student.⁶⁰ Lee was all too aware of such discrepancies, particularly as they impinged on the production of aesthetic knowledge. As Evangelista has elegantly charted, Lee developed a method that privileged bodily and emotional sensitivity to objects, rather than the type of cultural sensitivity provided and fostered by male-centric educational models.⁶¹ The Fields, in contrast, withdrew from scholarship in its traditional form. Whilst they took every opportunity for education afforded to them and were rigorous self-educators, the Fields, as we shall see, formed their own articulation of the aesthetic tradition: the poetic reconceived as a critical endeavour.

In accordance with Pater’s pleasure principle, the Fields treated their home as a site of poetic intervention, a place for ‘living Aestheticism’, with shrines to the antique god Bacchus and countless reproductions of Renaissance artworks.⁶² Dress was likewise an extension of their aesthetic principles, permitting them to embody a ‘femme’ aestheticism which, as Parker has shown, upended dominant models of sexual inversion being developed in Britain in the period.⁶³ The Fields’ aestheticism of selfhood was also enacted through their friendships, most notably with the couple Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, whose domestic arrangements have been subject to extensive comment.⁶⁴ The Fields delighted in visiting the ‘house of the sacred ones’, comparing the couple to artworks and even to ‘angel[s]’.⁶⁵ Lee could not have been further from this model of aestheticism − gender non-conforming in dress and uninterested in the poetics of domesticity cultivated by the Fields and their circle. Whilst she had a professed dislike of ‘masculine’ women, Lee was read by the majority of her contemporaries as such, and Havelock Ellis (Britain’s leading sexologist) even considered the critic as a possible case study for his research on sexual inversion.⁶⁶ The Fields were shocked by Lee’s apparent indifference towards her domestic surroundings. Lunch is ‘as tasteless a meal as one would expect in so unhomely a home’, whilst the house itself ‘has no charm, it is crowded, awkwardly disposed’.⁶⁷ The house even served as an analogy for Lee herself, since ‘like its mistress [it] has no central unity of purpose’.⁶⁸ Within this un-home, Lee held court with her bloodily ‘metallic’ conversation. Casting themselves as a bound entity, ‘the poet’, in contrast, ‘sat in dual quietness’.⁶⁹

Later that afternoon, the Fields used the figure of the poet a second time as a means of distinguishing themselves from the rest of the group. On a walk through the countryside with Lee, Cruttwell and Anstruther-Thomson, the group were pursued by a number of dogs, and whilst the Fields ran and hid, the others faced the animals. There is a comical distinction set up in the diary between the Fields on the one hand and the three ‘immense’ women, headed by the ‘ghoulish’ Lee, on the other.⁷⁰ Whilst the Fields call themselves ‘the timid poets’, the others are ‘fierce, tail-gripping women, all teeth + courage + pugnacity’.⁷¹ When one of them calls out to the Fields that they may emerge from their hiding place, it is with ‘a voice as cool as a man’s’.⁷² The Fields had described Anstruther-Thomson in similar terms on meeting her for the first time in a gallery, when they noted that there was ‘enough of the man in her for one to compare her to the lion in the lioness’.⁷³ Despite this, the Fields saw no contradiction in enjoying their own form of gender play, recounting in the third person how ‘Michael’ and ‘Henry’, their male personas, hid from the group and the dogs. The persona Henry was created in 1891 after a stint in hospital when Cooper’s hair was shorn and she ‘became’ a beautiful boy.⁷⁴ Within the Fields’ sphere of aesthetic artistry, therefore, gender ambiguity was an acceptable conceit. When it played out in life, however, the other three women seemed to violate the fragile terms of gendered aesthetic convention.

The Fields were frank in their evaluation of Cruttwell as ‘the unwomanly woman’.⁷⁵ This masculinity became the centre of debate during the trip when a heated discussion erupted over the definition of beauty. Berenson had defined beauty as ‘the sexually desirable’, a position to which Cruttwell took offence.⁷⁶ The Fields, who unambiguously agreed with Berenson, were fascinated by Cruttwell’s unwillingness to back down on the point:

She spoke of herself as abnormal, as probably physically different. It seemed to me she stripped naked + the nakedness was not at all beautiful + therefore abominable . . . She stood like St. Sebastian to receive our last words⁷⁷

Such a graphic presentation of the aesthetic and erotic violence of knowledge mythologizes Cruttwell, but it also dehumanizes her, reducing the scholar to a fleshly body. The Fields suggest that her intellectual convictions are symptomatic of a de-sexing, although characteristically this is made somewhat ambiguous by their picturing of her as St Sebastian, an androgynous and homoerotic figure with established aesthetic precedence.⁷⁸ Like the vampire, the allusion to St Sebastian points to the Fields’ engagement in a masculine poetics in order to figure a transgressively gendered body.

Cooper notes despairingly that ‘Miss C . . . talk[s] to Michael about women + ‘accouplement’, treating all marriage as if it were for children just as it is possible to treat all the green life of the Earth as if it were mere food for digestion. Dio mio!’.⁷⁹ Echoing the radical sexual politics of the New Woman, Cruttwell made an argument for eugenics by claiming that a healthy (rather than attractive) mate should be selected as a partner for offspring.⁸⁰ Agreeing with Berenson that sexual passion and not functionality was key to a relationship, the Fields maintained their earlier position that ‘the whole problem of life turns on pleasure’.⁸¹ The Fields had explored similar themes of pleasure and sexual autonomy in their play Attila, my Attila! which would be staged the following year. Set in late antique Rome, the play narrates the consequences of love outside social and gendered boundaries through the affairs of the noble woman Honoria first with the enslaved Eugenius and then Attila, king of the Huns.⁸² As Joseph Bristow has shown, the play was remarkable in ‘affirming Honoria’s yearning for intimacy’.⁸³ Through its crafting of female desire, which was directly in opposition to the commonly held view expressed by the Athenaeum that women ‘cannot approach the fires of Eros’, the Fields created their own form of modern womanhood.⁸⁴ They describe Honoria in the diary as the ‘New Woman of the fifth century’ and in the preface to the play claim that ‘Honoria is the New Woman of the fifth century’.⁸⁵ Their tacit approval of Honoria’s character was signalled through their ideal choice of Sarah Bernhardt to play the role of Honoria, who had been described by them as an ‘elfin travesty of a man’ in her performance of Pélleas, and yet who was also able to transcend the boundaries of gender as ‘this being acts Pélleas till sex is forgotten as an accident’.⁸⁶ Once again, certain circumstances seem to exempt female masculinity from becoming a problematic designator, where it instead becomes a marker of poetic licence and inspiration.

The Fields presented Cruttwell’s masculinity, in contrast, as a perversion of her sex: whilst ‘she is an earnest, self-ruling, fine creature – Woman, I cannot call her’.⁸⁷ She is the opposite of Berenson, who spoke that evening ‘full of . . . poetry’, a quality invoked by the Fields to suggest a temperament aligned to their own.⁸⁸ Defined in opposition to womanhood, the Fields suggest Cruttwell remains constrained within it, using ‘examples unnecessarily coarse, as women so often do’ and speaking ‘with most feminine intention of arguing [sic]’.⁸⁹ In many respects, the Fields appear to be co-opting the misogyny of critics of the ‘Woman Question’, who framed the masculine woman as a risible yet threatening figure whose mind, as one Punch cartoon satirized, was ‘a world of disorderly notions picked out of books’.⁹⁰ It is evident that this critique provided the Fields with a convenient means to distinguish their own form of gender non-conformity from the type they saw to be associated with Cruttwell and her colleagues. The Fields frequently used male pronouns for each other and had no issue with being called masculine: one evening, for instance, a companion is startled to hear them referred to as men, but the Fields proudly assure him that ‘the plural masculine gender was applied to us’.⁹¹ The dispute between the Fields and Cruttwell, therefore, is a helpful reminder that female masculinity, for all its seemingly transgressive aspects, did not uncomplicatedly suggest a ‘progressive’ identity, and indeed could be used in the service of hegemonic ideas about gender.⁹²

The Fields were content to lump Cruttwell together with Lee and Anstruther-Thomson in order to dismiss the lot. They repeated Berenson’s proclamation that ‘all [Cruttwell] had been saying was essentially old-maidish + reminded him of Il Palmerino’, and reaffirmed it themselves: ‘Violet Paget + all the women who have been depressing our vitality for a fortnight think like Miss C[ruttwell]. They are a new + terrible Band – the old-maids of intellect’.⁹³ The use of Lee’s birth name, where elsewhere the Fields refer to the writer with her preferred Vernon Lee, seems calculated to diminish the authority of Lee’s authorial position, whilst the reference to the ‘old maids of intellect’ suggests a sexual and intellectual sterility in the group.⁹⁴ By ‘depressing our vitality’, the group is once again reminiscent of the vampires of fin-de-siècle fiction, preying on their victim’s lifeforce. Cooper, by contrast, is sure to note her own vitality, a key quality of the aesthetic individual as formulated by Pater, recording Costelloe’s compliment that she ‘had vitality in the Pateresque use of the term’.⁹⁵ The diary entry, then, reinforces a distinction between the Fields and the ‘old maids of intellect’ as the Fields negotiated their position within the undefined space of a new aestheticism. Crucially, their promotion of the poet critic, a figure embodied in the person of Berenson, suggests an affinity with a queer masculinity that doubles down on the inheritance to a Paterian tradition suggested through the use of the vampire analogy. This tradition is exactly what the ‘old maids’ appear to debase in their treatment of Berenson, the Fields’ muse:

All these women – the five or six Maenads of Fiesole take him only as an art critic to exploit. What can they know of him as a Faun, a thinker on life like Cheiron, a personality made to be poets’ stuff⁹⁶

The accusation is familiar: rather than ‘old maids’, the group are now ‘Maenads of Fiesole’, who merely ‘exploit’ true ‘thinker[s]’ that have personalities ‘made to be poets’ stuff’, a quality that cannot be taught. The reference to the maenad furthermore shifts the usual character markers for the Fields, in which they themselves are often maenads serving their ‘faun’ Berenson. On a carriage drive through Hyde Park in 1891, for instance, when talking of ‘art + life all the way’ Berenson had turned to tell them that he was in fact a ‘faun’, and that he was going to dedicate his life to making many others fauns too.⁹⁷ Delighted with the invitation, the Fields took up the nickname and employed many antique images of companionship to frame their relationship with him.⁹⁸ The Fields transformed Berenson into a living antiquity, who appears in the diaries peppered with allusions to classical mythology, thus embodying the poetic principles laid out in their antique-inspired volumes of poetry. As the relationship with Berenson soured, however, so too the antique framework became troubled. Cooper notes angrily that ‘he would like me to be his maenad; he has no intention of serving me’.⁹⁹ Yopie Prins has sensitively analysed the significance of the maenad role for Michael Field’s mythical self-construction. In the present analysis, the maenad emerges additionally as a contested figure within the landscape of Field’ s gendered politic.¹⁰⁰ On the one hand, it provided the Fields with the opportunity to play with the gaze of desire, as on Easter Monday in 1894 when they lie ‘like fauns’ on the grass and see such a ‘pure a Maenad as ever danced’ that ‘the far yesterdays of Greece had been today with us’.¹⁰¹ On the other hand, it offered a vocabulary for exclusion, as when Bradley summed up Lee’s group with the damning (if contradictory) conclusion that ‘no, these big jointed inexorables are not maenads’.¹⁰² Ultimately, the appearance of Lee and her companions excluded the group from participating in the Fields’ mythic imagination, so that they remain mere ‘old maids’.

In many ways, Lee’s Miss Brown had already pre-empted this accusation. Anne, as previously described, is initially victim to the advances of aestheticism. When Anne finishes her education, she is taken back to London by Walter, robed with the latest artistic dress and displayed to a rapt aesthetic elite. She increasingly comes to recognize that she is being transformed into a piece of art by Walter, an object to be admired rather than a subject.¹⁰³ Despite the ambiguous ending, in which Anne marries Walter to save him from a decline into total immorality, Anne stands in moral and physical distinction to the aesthetes. In an extraordinary passage, Anne’s difference is outlined:

Some few women seem to be born to have been men, or at least not to have been women . . . Masculine women, mere men in disguise, they are not . . . they are, and can only be, true women; but women without woman’s instincts and wants, sexless – women made not for man but for humankind. Anne Brown was one of these¹⁰⁴

Anne Brown is celebrated for what Cruttwell is accused of: of being a ‘sexless’ woman without instinct, who has turned her back on pleasure. The passage suggests an alternate expression of female masculinity, and one that reads at odds with the Fields’ denouncement of Cruttwell. Female masculinity, it is clear, was neither singular nor uniform in the period. The Fields were evidently uncomfortable with the form of female masculinity they understood to be embodied by Lee, and by extension Anstruther-Thomson and Cruttwell. It is also clear, however, that the Fields’ close engagement with the personalities, appearances and ideas of these figures suggests a profound interest in what alternative masculinities might look like. In this way, the female masculinities described in the diary speak to the ‘topsy-turvydom’ of categories of gender and sexuality in the period.¹⁰⁵ Attending to such heterogeneity of expression, however, also offers new perspectives onto histories of late Victorian subjectivity: perspectives which crucially account for the complexities and nuances of gender-variant lives. Rather than dismissing examples of gender variance on grounds of its inconsistency or incoherency, a history of female masculinities in late Victorian aestheticism can offer enriching insights into the knotty ways in which subjects articulated and embodied their gendered selves at the end of the nineteenth century.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to acknowledge Dustin Friedman, Emily Rutherford, Caroline van Eck, Trev Boughton, Max Long, Anna Parker and Ewan Wallace, as well as the two anonymous readers, for their insightful comments and suggestions.

FUNDING

Funding for this research was provided by a studentship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) (AH/L503897/1) hosted by Pembroke College, Cambridge and a British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) funding grant.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Footnotes