This selection from the extensive oeuvre of the two women, aunt and niece, who called themselves 'Michael Field,' is a revelation. The editors have given us the most generous selection of the poems to date. The cold fire of Michael Field's lyricism, its compact, enigmatic language, is fully contextualized in the poet's debt to Nietzsche, to late century aestheticism, Hellenism, and feminism. The joint diary and the letters of this astonishing poet, with their intellectual astringency, wit, and frankly sensuous homoeroticism, and their acquaintance with major figures of aesthetic culture Pater, Vernon Lee, Browning, and the Berensons enable us to read the late nineteenth-century's modernism in a wholly new way. - Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, University of London
The two women who loved and wrote as 'Michael Field' feature in recent histories of Victorian sexuality, but this collection convincingly demonstrates their importance in the history of British poetry. A balanced and informative introduction and generous selections highlight the breadth of elements their lyrics synthesized-ancient Greek and Persian, Elizabethan, German, French, Roman Catholic, and even painterly. Extracts from Bradley and Cooper's journals and correspondence place them amidst aesthetes and critics from Ruskin and Wilde to Berenson, although contemporary reviews show them denied proper recognition. This anthology surveys a unique literary partnership that both reflected and influenced the main artistic currents of turn-of-the-century Britain. - Margaret Stetz, University of Delaware
Perhaps the most important of the year's publications, in terms of its effect on the future direction of Victorian poetry studies, was Michael Field, the Poet: Published and Manuscript Materials, edited by Ana Parejo Vadillo and Marion Thain. Bringing together a wide range of writings by the two women who worked under the name 'Michael Field', this single-volume edition is a product of the growing scholarly interest in this important fin-de-siecle writer, and it will surely be a spur to further work on the poet. - review in The Nineteenth Century: The Victorian Period
