‘The Eyes of an Intellectual Vampire’: Michael Field, Vernon Lee and Female Masculinities in Late Victorian Aestheticism

Abstract

Abstract This article reframes debate on the intersections of female aestheticism and cultural dissidence by focusing on the construction of queer masculinities at the end of the nineteenth century. Looking at the diary of Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), it examines the descriptions of Vernon Lee, Clementina (‘Kit’) Anstruther-Thompson and Maud Cruttwell during the Fields’ trip to Italy in 1895. The ambivalent presentation of these figures in the diary reveals a conflicted legacy of aestheticism, centred around the inheritance, interpretation and embodiment of queer masculinity. The article argues that the Fields developed themes associated with a previous generation of male aesthetes in order to articulate gender difference between themselves and other female-bodied aesthetes. In particular, it considers how the gender-variant Fields rejected Lee, Anstruther-Thomson and Cruttwell’s trans-masculinities as perversions of their sex.