I began my career with Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 (UK 1993, US 1996), and followed it up with We Are Michael Field (1998, a biography of a pair of Victorian women writers). I have edited two anthologies, Poems Between Women: Four Centuries of Love, Romantic Friendship and Desire (UK title What Sappho Would Have Said) (1997) and The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Short Stories (1999) as well as publishing a range of scholarly articles. In 2010 Knopf and Random House Canada brought out my study of a thousand years of plot motifs in Western literature, Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature, which won the Stonewall Non-Fiction Award from the American Library Association.
I have also taught creative writing for the Cheltenham Literary Festival and the Arvon Foundation, been a writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario and the University of York (UK), co-presenter of a primetime book series on Irish television, and a judge for the Irish Times Literature Prizes and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Award for Fiction.