The preface considers why historical context is such a rich and complicated lens through which to approach Michael Field and their work, given the complexity of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s lives and collaborative identity as Michael Field, and the startling range of past historical periods with which their work engaged, including Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Renaissance Italy, among other periods. The Preface approaches Michael Field as firmly situated within the cultures of the fin de siècle or 1890s, and discusses how their work develops in the twentieth century or modernist era. Finally, the Preface approaches the more difficult aspects of Michael Field’s identity, addressing issues of gender, sexuality, and the incestual dimension of Bradley and Cooper’s relationship.

Chapter 5 explores the lived experience of communal relations and the importance of joining art to literature by examining the poetry and verse dramas of Michael Field. This chapter looks specifically at the ways in which the couple reclassify and revitalize female tragic history by experimenting with the boundaries of literary form. As a case study that aligns with the late Victorian transition into Modernism, this chapter locates a shift in conceptions of liberal community development as Michael Field complicate critical dichotomies between Victorian and Decadent; Decadent and Modern. In so doing, I suggest that Michael Field carries traces of the liberal sympathetic experience witnessed in their life-writing into their amalgamation of specifically decadent characteristics in their poetry and verse drama. The shift toward Decadence that Michael Field marks in this project allows for a seamless move into Modernism.