"Michael Field" is the pseudonym of Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper, an aunt and niece who together wrote twenty-eight plays (twenty-seven tragedies and one masque) and eight volumes of poetry. They also produced a journal of thirty volumes that documents their life together in daily entries, drafts of poetry, and transcribed letters; a small portion of this voluminous work, which is now housed in the British Library, was compiled by their literary executor, T. Sturge Moore and his son, Daniel, and published in 1933. Everything they wrote after 1884 was published under the Field pen name; they continued to use the name after their dual authorship was made public and also for later volumes of poetry that were primarily the work of one writer rather than of both.

The publications of Michael Field were praised by reviewers until it was revealed that the supposed singular male author was...