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Michael Field and the Detachable Lyric

This essay investigates three material contexts of Michael Field's "She was a royal lady born" in order to argue for the centrality of detachment in Field's concept of the lyric genre. I examine the song as it first appeared in print, in the verse drama The Tragic Mary; I turn then to its manuscript form in Field's collective journal, "Works and Days," and lastly to the song's relocation in their anthology Underneath the Bough. The song itself—and each of its contexts—meditates on intimate attachment, both textual and personal. Taken together, these multiple incarnations reveal the lyric mode to depend on bonds that must consistently be unformed and reformed with every act of writing and reading.