“After the first flush of acclamation their work was treated with ever-increasing coldness by the literary world, and there is no doubt that the discovery that Michael Field was no avatar ... but two women, was partly responsible.”[1] The handful of volumes which have been available for inspection seem far from works of genius; nevertheless, the poems have as much freshness and lyric charm as those of many other minor writers who are repeatedly included in anthologies. The plays, though they exhibit careful historical scholarship, are weighted with moral or feministic message and seem artificial and heavy. The one that reached the stage in their own day was an immediate failure. There is evidence in the luxurious format of their privately printed volumes, and in the description of the house in Richmond where they lived after Mr. Cooper’s death, that they were blessed with ample means, and beyond doubt their thirty-five years of adult life together were happier than the lives of most Victorian spinsters. They cultivated the acquaintance of all the surviving nineteenth-century poets, and derived much excitement from moderate friendships with the aging Browning and Meredith. But the Victorian era as a whole was disinclined to honor two “Platonists” as the previous century had done, and their closest friends were a pair of Royal Academy artists, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, who lived together near them in a relationship evidently comparable to their own. That they did not escape disapprobation is indicated indirectly in several of the entries in _Works and Days_. When they first recognized Ricketts and Shannon at an art exhibition they hesitated long before speaking, uncertain how such a gesture might be received, even though Ricketts had designed the cover for one of their recent volumes. After attending another “private view” one Sunday afternoon in 1889, Katherine made much in their journal of being greeted by Fairfax Murray. “We recognized that he was proud to manifest to the world that we were his friends.”[2] And in connection with one of their volumes of verse, _Long Ago_ (1889), based on fragments from Sappho, Katherine told Browning that “we meant to do no more harm than George Herbert, when he took a text from Holy Writ and wrote a hymn thereon.” The harm they were accused of having done is not mentioned. The relation between the two women is more difficult to analyze than any so far encountered. Some time before the publication of their first volume of poems they were moved to a step best described in a later poem of Katherine’s: