This chapter sets Michael Field’s work in the context of the twentieth century and modernism. The first part of the chapter concentrates on Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s complex and ambivalent responses to modernity. The chapter then focuses on Michael Field’s reception and republication in the 1920s and 1930s through the efforts of Thomas Sturge Moore, Mary C. Sturgeon, and Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop. Finally, the chapter compares Michael Field’s poetry to the imagist works of Ezra Pound and H.D., and the historical verse dramas of T. S. Eliot, demonstrating that Michael Field’s work has as much in common with modernist writers as with their late-Victorian contemporaries.

The internet has expanded access to the works of Michael Field by making them freely available in digital form. This chapter explains how digital editions differ from print editions and raises questions about whether we should consider them as the same text or not. It identifies the basic types of digital editions, describes how the process of creating them can introduce changes into the text, and discusses how minor textual changes can affect how we interpret what we read. Two common options for encoding digital texts are introduced, and we consider the promise of textual encoding to enmesh the text within the ‘semantic web’.