Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses

The title comes from Shakespeare's 'Merchant of Venice' - 'Underneath the bough' is where love is compared to a sweet lodger, a guest that comes unbidden and departs with reluctance. This collection contains some of the finest aesthetic poetry of the British fin de siècle, written by two women who lived and wrote together for forty years at the turn of the twentieth century. Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper published under the pseudonym Michael Field, and their verses pulse with a sensuousness and emotional intensity that clearly emanated from their own long partnership. Many of these poems draw on classical mythology - Attis, Sappho, the groves and rivers of ancient Greece - as vehicles for expressing same-sex desire with startling directness. The imagery is often lush, sometimes aching in its restraint, always precise. Nature becomes a code in which forbidden longing could be spoken. This is not merely a historical document but a book that burns with genuine feeling, its passion disguised but never extinguished by the polite conventions of late Victorian verse. For readers who love lyric poetry, for those interested in how love has always found ways to declare itself, and for anyone who wants to witness two women writing beautiful, bold verses about loving each other at a time when doing so was criminal.