Description: She shows how the letters provide a context for understanding the development of specific works and for reevaluating the significance of Michael Field as a late-Victorian writer.
Review Quotes:
I had thought that the generous spirit of the great mid-twentieth-century editors of letters had died with them--that it was no longer to be found in the new generation of academics. My faith has been restored by Sharon Bickle's The Fowl and the Pussycat. Yes, it is clearly a labor of love, which testifies to Bickle's romance, if you will, with Bradley and Cooper. But it is also a reflection of the author's love of Victorian literature, art, culture, politics, and daily life as a whole and of her dedication to embracing and understanding everything about the past. Indeed, she shares with the Victorians themselves a love of knowledge for knowledge's sake--the kind of compendious knowledge that grows out of boundless curiosity about all phenomena.
--Margaret D. Stetz, University of Delaware, author of Facing the Late Victorians and coeditor of Michael Field and Their World