ABSTRACT
Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the aunt and niece who wrote together under the joint pseudonym of ‘Michael Field’, spent the afternoon of June 17, 1891, at Oscar Wilde’s house. The visit took place at the height of a new renaissance of print and bookbinding and, unsurprisingly, the conversation turned to book design. Wilde was of the opinion that the two most beautiful books of the nineteenth century ‘in appearance’ were Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems (1870) and Michael Field’s The Tragic Mary (1890). Keen readers of D.G. Rossetti, Michael Field believed, just like Rossetti, William Morris and Wilde, that art, literature and design could not be disassociated from each other. All of Michael Field’s books were conceived as art objects, where form and content, design and poetry created together the aesthetics of the volume. What is fascinating, and not incidental, about this conversation (fully recorded by Cooper in the women’s joint diary, Works and Days) is that it begins with a detailed description of the clothes that Wilde and his wife wore on this occasion:
We visit Oscar Wilde – being received by Mrs. Oscar in turquoise blue, white frills & amber stockings. The afternoon goes on in a dull fashion till Oscar enters. He wears a lilac shirt, a heliotrope tie, a great primrose pink – very Celtic combination, ma foi! (Add.MS.46779 fols.54r–54v) 1
