This book is one I would give anything to have in my own collection but with only 27 copies of the book produced, it would be an elusive find indeed! Thanks to my husband’s book finding skills, he discovered a copy of WHYMCHOW: FLAME OF LOVE online at the University of British Columbia, for all to read and enjoy. The photos of portions of the book below are from THIS LINK, where you may read for yourself the incredible love and devotion these two authors Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper , had for their little dog “Whym Chow”, writing under the pen name of Michael Field.
“Throughout their thirty-year partnership, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper challenged, escaped, or reinvented the definitions and roles available to women in the fin-de-siécle. While their intense connection to each other was socially sanctioned by the fact that they were aunt and niece, they reinvented these roles as they developed a relationship as lovers. As poets, they took the name Michael Field, writing and publishing verse dramas and collections of poetry that trouble both traditional notions of authorship and gender.
Throughout their career they were tireless supporters of animal rights as active members of the anti-vivisection movement. Thus, just as their lives and work challenge traditional ideas about the family and heterosexual normativity, they also question the all too human presumption that homo sapiens has the right to inflict its will on the other creatures of the world. The growing critical recuperation of Michael Field in the work of Yopie Prins, Christine White, Holly Laird, and others has focused on the transgressive nature of their lives and the pivotal role of Sappho in their poetry.“
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