The work combines biographical material with theoretical readings of the poems, and offers new reinterpretations of some original and intriguing literature. Much of this had been by-passed or forgotten before Angela Leighton's work.

Angela Leighton is Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. She was previously Professor of English at the University of Hull. She has worked mainly on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, on women's writing, on aestheticism and the aesthetic, and on poetry generally. She has published many articles and various critical books, as well as three volumes of poetry.