Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper flourished in England in the early part of this century - and flourished is the operative word. For the opening night of one of their plays, Katherine appeared in a green velveteen opera cloak edged with black fur while Edith swanned around in a green dress and a red opera cloak. They buried their pet dog at the bottom of a statue of Dionysus which they had erected in their garden and wrote a whole book of verse about him.

Their house was full of 18th century satinwood furniture. Japanese prints hung on the walls and doves cooed in a cage. When Edith's father died from a fall while climbing in the Alps, they visited the scene of his death a year later and there exchanged rings.

In We are Michael Field, Emma Donoghue has set out to pin down two most extraordinary women of letters for, using the pseudonym Michael Field, they jointly produced a vast body of work including plays, prose and poetry.

While much of the poetry is of the dum-tee-dum variety ("It was deep April and the morn Shakespeare was born") and the dialogue in the plays decidedly over the top, it is the women's relationship and their lifestyle that dominates this story. Katherine, the elder by sixteen years, was Edith's aunt and, when the latter was old enough, the two became lovers and remained so - passionately and ecstatically - until Edith's death from cancer at the age of fifty-two. They were bound together by their love of writing.

The affair was conducted under the roof of Edith's parents - her mother was Katherine's sister - and though they shared a bed this was not thought improper for it was customary for young women to form passionate friendships, to write poetry and take long walks together. Edith's father, it seems, was happy with the situation, since the lesbian relationship meant his authority as a father was never threatened by another man.

Edith and her aunt were not entirely nice to know. They were horribly bourgeois, holding that actors were a "caste apart". They disliked the "loafers and holidaymakers" who walked along the banks of the Thames and whose noisy outings they could hear from the other side of their garden wall. When staying with friends and taking a liking to a painting, they simply removed it from the wall and took it home with them.

Few men managed to break into their citadel and those who did tended not to present a challenge to either. Their closest friends were two gay men, and in later life they both espoused Catholicism and made new, even safer, relationships with their two confessors.

It is hard not to see Katherine and Edith as a couple of dotty women, paying to have their own plays printed, using their money to indulge their literary aspirations, behaving in a silly, ostentatious way, uncaring of anything outside their immediate circle. Nevertheless, they remained true to their own selves - dotty or not - and their love affair endured not least because they shared the most private of intimacies - not a toothbrush, but a diary, in which each one wrote.

Emma Donoghue is clearly besotted with her subjects and together with Absolute Press - whose imprint, Outlines, focuses on the creative aspect of same-sex love affairs - has given a voice to two women who, though now no longer heard, were vociferous in their lifetime.

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