For the final thirty years of their shared life, Michael Field kept an annual, co-authored diary that they entitled Works and Days. While this remarkable text provides a documentary perspective on the personalities and places of the literary and artistic fin de siècle, it also represents a significant literary achievement in its own right. The diary offers its readers an inside look at Michael Field’s interpersonal and coauthorial relationship across its many seasons, while also offering its authors a giant canvas, reminiscent of the span of a Victorian novel, for the exploration of complex questions about authorship, gender, sexuality, and desire.

The fourth chapter challenges our tendency to conflate fin-de-siècle aestheticism with a pessimistic Decadence by exploring the “life-enhancing” aesthetics of Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and her younger colleague, the American connoisseur Bernard Berenson. Steeped in Walter Pater’s aesthetic philosophy and Herbert Spencer’s progressive evolutionism, both Lee and Berenson attempted to balance their passion for Renaissance art with their equally strong commitments to scientific rationalism and (especially in Lee’s case) social amelioration. Looking at Lee’s extensive corpus of critical prose, travel writing, and fiction as well as Berenson’s early Renaissance studies, this chapter argues that their intersecting investigations into the nature of beauty culminated in Lee’s influential “psychological aesthetics”: a cross-disciplinary theory that insisted on the evolutionary value of positive aesthetic experience and thus elevated the stakes of public taste.