Michael Field, Death, and the Effigy

Abstract

This article examines the views of Edith Cooper and Katharine Bradley, the female poetic couple known as ‘Michael Field’, regarding the matter of memorial effigies. Starting with Cooper’s essay ‘Effigies’ (1890) on the memorial sculptures and funeral effigies of Westminster Abbey, it then explores both women’s reactions, as expressed in their shared diaries, to a variety of physical presentations and representations of the dead—mummies, waxworks, the corpses of the Paris morgue—to elicit their expectations of memorial sculpture, and frame their particular reactions to Edward Onslow Ford’s Shelley Memorial, seen on two separate occasions in 1892 and 1897.