Michael Field are remembered for their poetic works, but they also wrote short prose. Focusing on their collection of prose sketches or ‘croquis’ entitled For That Moment Only, this chapter sets their prose writings in the wider context of the fin-de-siècle trends towards the short story and aesthetic essay. Through analysis of stories like ‘A Maenad’, the chapter outlines Michael Field’s affinities with New Woman prose writers like George Egerton, as well as their affinities with decadent aesthetes like Oscar Wilde. Ultimately, this chapter shows that attending to Michael Field’s prose works as well as their poetry provides a more accurate picture of their distinct contribution to turn-of-the-century literary culture.

Although they were transgressive and unconventional figures in both literary and personal terms, were Bradley and Cooper ‘New Women’, and could their works be categorised with those by ‘New Women’ of the 1890s? While declining to offer any definitive judgement, this chapter points to a series of elements present in their writings and also featured in those of such feminist (and non-feminist) contemporaries as Olive Schreiner and ‘George Egerton’. Ultimately, though, readers are left to decide how much Bradley and Cooper, who seemingly chose to remain closer to literary men and to masculine concerns, can be classed with late-Victorian ‘New Women’.

The discussion of occult feminism in Chapter 5 shifts the foundations of Decadent Ecology to a reality beyond the veil. The last chapter of this study returns to the turf from which it began with my ruminations on Holywell Cemetery. Chapter 6 examines works by George Egerton, Arthur Machen, and William Sharp, each of whom introduces a different form of paganism to their earthy decadent ecologies. The authors find in paganism scalar distortions and other forms of eco-excess that problematize distinctions between the spiritual, secular, and scientific. At the same time, while all are, today, recognized as part of the urbane, fin-de-siècle culture of Wilde and Beardsley, each, in fact, turns to the local and the rural as the site of their decadent intimacies. We hear in their often conflicted renderings of the pagan landscape voices for sexual, eco-spiritual, and regionalist politics.