In the last twenty years, Michael Field has emerged as one of the most fascinating poets of the Victorian era. Through their collaborative partnership as “Michael Field,” Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper engaged in the aesthetic and decadent movements of the fin de siècle, while their poetry and verse drama articulate ideas associated with the New Woman and boldly express queer and lesbian desire. Michael Field: Decadent Moderns extends the focus on these key literary and cultural contexts by emphasizing their continuing significance within twentieth-century literary modernism. Through a series of interdisciplinary essays, this book addresses Michael Field’s energetic engagements with a range of topics including ecology, perfume, tourism, art history, sculpture, formalism, classics, and book history. In doing so, Michael Field: Decadent Moderns highlights the modernity, radicalism, and relevance of their work, both within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as in our own cultural moment.

Contributors: Leire Barrera-Medrano, Joseph Bristow, Jill R. Ehnenn, Sarah E. Kersh, Kristin Mahoney, Catherine Maxwell, Alex Murray, Sarah Parker, Margaret D. Stetz, Kate Thomas, and Ana Parejo Vadillo.

Sarah Parker is a lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She is the author of The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889–1930 and articles and chapters on Olive Custance, Constance Naden, Amy Levy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Djuna Barnes, and Sarah Waters.

Ana Parejo Vadillo is a reader in nineteenth-century literature and culture at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity and coauthor of Michael Field, The Poet: Published and Manuscript Materials and Victorian Literature: A Sourcebook.