Margaret Stetz and Cheryl Wilson, eds. Michael Field and Their World. High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2007. ISBN 1904201083. Price: US$55.00/£30.00

In the past twenty years, our understanding of fin-de-siècle aestheticism has been enlarged and enriched through the resuscitation of the literary reputation of late-Victorian women writers such as Amy Levy, Vernon Lee, and Michael Field. Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the aunt and niece who “took hands and swore,/ Against the world, to be/ Poets and lovers evermore” and wrote collaboratively under the pseudonym “Michael Field,” have proven to be a particularly rich locus for recent scholarship. The fascinating decisions they made regarding the production of their work, their rich relationship to late-Victorian aesthetic theory, and the lush eroticism of their poetry have attracted diverse scholarly approaches and yielded a growing body of important criticism. Margaret Stetz and Cheryl Wilson’s recent collection, Michael Field and Their World, with its emphasis on the manner in which Cooper and Bradley engaged with the world around them, grounds this growing body of scholarship by situating the phenomenon of Michael Field within both a social and a textual world. The essays in this volume attend to the influences that underwrote Cooper and Bradley’s literary production, their self-consciousness about their position within a transitional literary moment, as well as their interest in socialism and their concerns about the commodification of the aesthetic. Rather than positing Cooper and Bradley as singular, strange, detached, and apolitical, the volume reads the authors as fundamentally collaborative. Cooper and Bradley collaborated with one another, certainly, but they were also writers who saw themselves as collaborating with literary tradition and the visual arts as well as conversing with the culture and politics of the period. The breadth of approaches and texts included in this collection attests to the rich diversity of Michael Field’s oeuvre as well as their wide-ranging and sophisticated engagement with their world. As the editors themselves note, “in homage to the Michael Fields’ own desire to question and overthrow limiting labels of various sorts, the writers of these selections often touch upon many topics and approaches at once” (8). Cooper and Bradley’s creative re-imagining of Catholicism is revealed to be intimately tied up with their investigation of alternative sexual personae, and their fascination with the past is demonstrated to have played an integral role in their critique of modern materialism. The works in this volume indicate that Michael Field’s interest in history, aesthetics, and diverse religious traditions should be understood in relationship to the implicitly ethical and political choices that underwrote the personal lives of Cooper and Bradley and their chosen modes of literary production. Recent scholarship on late-Victorian aestheticism has reconfigured our sense of the movement by foregrounding the aesthetes’ social-mindedness. Rather than retreating from ethical and political concerns, members of the Aesthetic and Decadent Movements in England actively engaged with a diverse set of public issues including the “Woman Question,” socialist reform, and sexual politics. In this sense, the attentiveness to Michael Field’s social, political, and economic concerns on display in Michael Field and Their World offers a window into the state of the field. Demonstrating how scholars of aestheticism and decadence have begun to attend to the social investments of the aesthetes, the essays in this volume read Michael Field’s literary output in light of Cooper and Bradley’s economic thinking, their unconventional and unique modes of gender and sexual identification, as well as their active engagement with religious discourse. Ana Vadillo’s essay on Michael Field’s historical plays, for example, reveals Cooper and Bradley to be engaging with contemporary issues, such as the rise of the New Woman, Social Darwinism, socialism, and the commodification of culture. Marion Thain shares Vadillo’s interest in the sophisticated manner …