For the final thirty years of their shared life, Michael Field kept an annual, co-authored diary that they entitled Works and Days. While this remarkable text provides a documentary perspective on the personalities and places of the literary and artistic fin de siècle, it also represents a significant literary achievement in its own right. The diary offers its readers an inside look at Michael Field’s interpersonal and coauthorial relationship across its many seasons, while also offering its authors a giant canvas, reminiscent of the span of a Victorian novel, for the exploration of complex questions about authorship, gender, sexuality, and desire.

This chapter considers Michael Field’s collaborative authorship, focusing on the tension between singularity and plurality in their shared authorial identity. It explores Michael Field’s pseudonymous collaboration as a constant negotiation between multiple voices that radically revises conceptions of both life-writing and verse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter surveys Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s shared diary Works and Days and their poems, such as ‘A girl’ to show how they generate a sense of unison in their work, in the process achieving a fluid negotiation between different voices.

This chapter explores the spatial dimensions of the trope of the epic return journey (the nostos) and focuses on the physical and emotive experiences which such a journey produces. Loney first highlights dislocation as an important feature in epic, and a motivating force behind its plot: the feeling of being separated in time or space from a more ideal past or home. Under this single conception of ‘dislocation’, the chapter brings together two poetic themes which scholars have traditionally treated discretely: nostalgia and homesickness. Archaic epics, especially Hesiod’s Works and Days, rely on a narrative of decline—of temporal dislocation—from an antecedent ‘golden age’, for which internal characters and external audiences are nostalgic. Similarly, characters in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey may be spatially dislocated and homesick, motivating a return journey (prototypically Odysseus, but also at moments Achilles and Helen).

Greek agriculture took place within a largely Mediterranean regime of annual, dry-farmed grains and pulses, alongside perennial vines and olives. Hesiod’s Works and Days, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, the Attic orators, inscriptions, intensive survey, and comparative data from before 1950 form the main evidence. The agricultural year centred around winter sowing and summer harvest. Scholars propose two competing models of agriculture. Extensive agriculture used draft animals and biennial fallow and was more suited to at least mid-sized holdings, nucleated settlement, and transhumant livestock. Intensive agriculture required greater hand-cultivation and was suited to smaller plots, dispersed settlement, and mixed farming to provide year-round animal manure. High risk of crop failure made intensification, diversification, and storing a ‘normal surplus’ a rational subsistence strategy for smaller landowners. However, there is also evidence for connectivity and production for market. Debates over agricultural slavery, settlement, and possible intensification from the fifth century BCE intersect with the question of market participation.