TY - JOUR AU - Cantillo Lucuara, Mayron Estefan PY - 2018/10/29 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Michael Field's Sapphism: An Ontology of the Feminine in "Long Ago" (1889) JF - Lectora: revista de dones i textualitat JA - Lectora VL - 0 IS - 24 SE - MISCEL·LÀNIA DO - 10.1344/Lectora2018.24.12 UR - https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/lectora/article/view/25062 SP - 205-222 AB - <p>This article examines the valuable contribution that Katherine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper made to the vast tradition of queer Sapphism in <em>Long Ago</em> (1889), their first volume of poetry published under the collaborative pseudonym of Michael Field. Taking as my starting point the well-established assumption among contemporary critics that this volume represents an original instance of lesbian writing, I seek to argue that <em>Long Ago</em> not only appropriates and celebrates the figure of Sappho as a lesbian archetype, it also proposes a subversive gender theory that conceptualises the feminine as the essential principle of vitalism, the masculine as the very representation of death, and homoeroticism as the most genuine form of love.</p> ER -