"Damnable" Aesthetes: The Correspondence of ‘Michael Field’ and Father John Gray.
Sharon Bickle
The primary aim of this project is the production of a scholarly edition of the correspondence exchanged by ‘Michael Field’ (Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper) and Father John Gray, best known as the beautiful youth supposedly courted by Oscar Wilde through the title character of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). These letters, held by the National Library of Scotland, represent a vital new source of information not only for researchers interested in these poets, but in the construction of pre-modern gay and lesbian sexuality; in the historical links between homosexuality and the Catholic church in the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century; in lifewriting and the production and rewriting of gendered identities.