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27 [BRADLEY, Katharine, & Edith Cooper.] FIELD, Michael. Poems of Adoration. London & Edinburgh: Sands & Co., [1912] Octavo. Original purple cloth, titles to spine in gilt, front cover elaborate- ly blocked in gilt with art nouveau iconographic design, edges untrimmed. Minor rubbing to spine ends and tips, top edge faintly dust toned, light fox- ing to endpapers and very occasionally to contents; a very good, remarkably bright copy. first edition of this collaboration by Edith Emma Cooper and her aunt and sometime lover Katharine Harris Bradley, pseudon- ymously-published. Their first publication as “Michael Field”, Cal- lirhoë (1884), was publicly well-received, with The Spectator greeting it “as a work of ‘great promise’, exhibiting ‘the true poetic [and dramatic] fire’” and later asking, “will the pseudonym of ‘Michael Field’ become greater even than that of ‘George Eliot’?” (Blain, p. 247). Contemporary admirers of their work included Robert Browning, George Meredith and Algernon Charles Swinburne, yet until very recently their work was not widely critically studied. Cooper and Bradley’s work was not, however, homogenous, and the present collection of Catholic lyric poetry is believed to have been composed predominantly by Cooper (1862–1913). The present work was Cooper’s final authorial contribution to the pair’s work, composing the majority of her contribution to Poems of Adoration from her sickbed (she died not long after the work’s publication). Despite explicitly identifying first as atheists (1877) and later as pa- gans (1897), the two converted to Catholicism in 1907. Cooper ini- tiated the move, and Bradley (1846–1914) devotedly followed. Their conversion put a definitive end to their earlier sexual relationship
which had diminished since Oscar Wilde’s trial and the subsequent outpouring of cultural homophobia in 1895. Blain, Virginia, “‘Michael Field, the two-headed nightingale’: Lesbian Text as Pal- impsest”, Women’s History Review 5:2, 1996. £500 [131330] 28 BRITTAIN, Vera. Verses of a V.A.D. Foreword by Marie Connor Leighton. London: Erskine Macdonald Ltd, 1918 Small octavo. Original buff boards, titles to spine and front board in dark blue, fore and bottom edges untrimmed. With the dust jacket. With three typed letters signed on A5 blue headed paper and three autograph postcards from the author, dated 7 December 1962; 10 March 1963; 15 March 1963; 5 April 1963; 3 October 1963; and 1 August 1966, all from 4 Whitehall Court, Westminster and addressed to Benita Brown (those dated 1962–1963 to St Martin-in-the-Fields, 5 St. Martin’s Place, WC2; the 1966 postcard to 34, Church Gardens. S. Ealing, W5). A fine copy in a beautiful example of the dust jacket. first edition, in the rare dust jacket, of Brittain’s first book and her only volume of war poetry, with six items of correspond- ence from the author laid in. Verses of a V.A.D. is notably scarce in commerce, and this is an extremely well-preserved copy. In the ac- companying correspondence, dated between 1962 and 1966, Brit- tain discusses the arrangements for three talks for Benita Brown, the secretary to The Centurion’s Arms club at St Martin-in-the- Fields: a talk on Brittain’s trip to India in 1963; a Brains Trust panel in November the same year; and a talk in 1966 on past vicars at St Martin-in-the-Fields. Poignantly, this final talk indirectly led to her decline in the last years of her life: “It was raining when she set off just after six o’clock on 2 November 1966 to give a talk at St Martin- in-the-Fields. Crossing Northumberland Avenue she tripped over some builders’ debris piled up in the gutter, and fell headlong on
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