“Lilies and Light and Liquor”

This chapter presents 1899 as a year of desire for Michael Field—and a year of action, in anticipation of a new century. Though it begins in apprehension about the meaning and implications of their desires, volume 13 of Works and Days is a narrative of Michael Field's new possibilities. Here the women take the abstract, emotional concept of a “home” firmly into the domain of the material: the nitty-gritty stuff of the everyday, from paint colors and ventilation to sublime satinwood. In 1899, Works and Days takes the measure of the domestic ideal using the yardstick of the domestic real. Their home is the anchor of the poets' identities, and their decision in late 1898 to leave their home at Durdans and seek a new one verges on the existential. But in an entirely stunning embrace of the pleasures of homemaking, Michael Field use their artistic powers to create a temple to their marriage.