A Shorter Shirazad: 101 Poems of Michael Field, and: Music and Silence: The Gamut of Michael Field, and: The Michael Field Catalogue: A Book of Lists (review)

Abstract

Despite increasing interest in the poetry of Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), little of it is in print and even less has received critical attention. It appeared originally from small presses in attractive small editions of between twenty-seven and a few hundred copies. Revised editions in America added 100 copies of Long Ago (the same number as in England) and—the largest edition by far—925 of Underneath the Bough, and T. Sturge Moore's brief and often inaccurate A Selection from the Poems of Michael Field appeared in 1925. When the upsurge of interest in women poets, gay and lesbian writing, and literary collaboration brought Michael Field back into view about a decade ago, even the name was unknown to most professional Victorianists. But the work done in essays by Chris White in "'Poets and lovers ever more': Interpreting Female Love in the Poetry and Journals of Michael Field" (1990) and in Angela Leighton's Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart (1992) has been followed by other critics, and the poems themselves have begun to reappear. Sight and Song and Underneath the Bough were reprinted in one volume (now out of print) in 1993, and there are substantial selections in recent collections of nineteenth-century women's poetry (Leighton and Reynolds, Higonnet, Armstrong and Blain) and Victorian anthologies (Collins and Rundle, Mermin and Tucker). Most of Michael Field's work is available online through subscribing libraries in the Chadwyck-Healey databases of English poetry and verse drama, although with only the "revised and decreased" second edition of Underneath the Bough, and without either the small 1930 collection, The Wattlefold, or, more distressingly, [End Page 621] Long Ago. Of the more than 900 published poems, however, some appeared only in periodicals, and many poems survive in manuscript but never were published at all.