The Verse Dramas of Michael Field

Amy Kahrmann Huseby is Senior Lecturer in English at Rice University and Executive Editor of SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. She is co-editor of Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics (2020) and The Cambridge History of Victorian Women's Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2026). Her research in gender and poetics appears widely across Victorian studies journals. Ana Parejo Vadillo is Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published extensively on fin-de-siècle literature and culture. Her work on Michael Field includes Michael Field, the Poet: Published and Manuscript Materials (2009), and Michael Field, Decadent Moderns (2019).  She is currently working on a book entitled Poetry in Polygamy.

• 1. Introduction: Michael Field, playwrights Ana Parejo Vadillo and Amy Kahrmann Huseby; 2. Michael Field's theater of beauty: staging emotions Ana Parejo Vadillo; 3. 'Wholly possessed': Michael Field's queer encounters with Renaissance history Frankie Dytor; 4. I recognized / the power of retribution in myself': Michael Field's Stephania: A Trialogue (1892) LeeAnne M. Richardson; 5. The spatiality of Michael Field's verse dramas Alex Murray; 6. 'Dreams that exile time': intertextuality, queer temporality, and Uranian love in Michael Field's Dian, Queen of Earth and Heaven and Hell Jill R. Ehnenn; 7. Brutus Ultor: Kant's moral law, the pagan earth, and fatherhood Sharon A. Bickle; 8. Irony and incongruity in Michael Field's treatment of fate: The case of Attila, My Attila! James Dowthwaite; 9. Jealousy, stigma, and authority in Michael Field's historical dramas Amy Kahrmann Huseby; 10. 'The voice within my breast': maternal bounty, father's tragedy Carolyn Dever; 11. 'Turning to modern drama': ibsenism and inter-theatricality in 'Quits' (1894) Rachel O'Nunain; 12. Autumn Love: aging, desire, and modernity in Anna Ruina (1899) Sarah Parker; 13. Dramatizing sexualities – modernizing modernisms: tracking the turn of the century through three plays by Michael Field Holly A. Laird.