matter ranged from nature, the supernatural, legends and folk tales to love, loss, and art itself. Although the poems can be mannered, her clarity of insight and feminist rereadings of traditional stories have kept her work fresh, while her penchant for formal experimentation presaged modernism. Watson's poems were published in various contemporary magazines and journals, including The Yellow Book. Her major volumes of poetry were Tares (1884), The Bird-Bride (1886), A Summer Night (1891), Vespertilia and Other Verses (1895), and After Sunset (1904). Tares, which was published as her first marriage was breaking up and focuses on the disillusionments of love, was issued anonymously. Watson used the Tomson pseudonym for The Bird-Bride and for the first edition of A Summer Night. In working under pseudonyms, Watson was part of a late 19th-century trend among women writers trying to break into male-dominated literary circles; among her contemporaries pursuing the same course were Mary N. Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock") and Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright ("George Egerton"). It appears to have helped her, since the influential editor Andrew Lang praised one of her early poems under the belief that it was by a man. Once Watson established herself in London's literary scene, later editions of A Summer Night carried her real name, as did her subsequent books, including the 1900 novel An Island Rose. Watson wrote prolifically on gardening, and her essays on the subject (together with a few of her poems) were published in The Heart of a Garden (1906). She also wrote several columns on interior design and fashion—her first-ever publication, in 1883, was a column on 'modern' fashion for the Fortnightly Review. Some of these columns were collected in The Art of the House (1897). She wrote a column entitled "Wares of Autolycous" for the Pall Mall Gazette. Starting in 1892, Watson edited the magazine Sylvia's Journal, which was a progressive, feminist-leaning women's monthly that covered a range of topics from work and art to the domestic sphere. Contributors under her tenure included Violet Hunt, Edith Nesbit, and others, and Watson herself wrote a book column, "Book Gossip". In 1892, a long interview with Watson was published in Arnold Bennett's journal Woman. Watson died of cancer on 29 December 1911 at the age of fifty-one. Her collected poems were published in 1912 with an introduction by H.B. Marriott Watson. Books Verse Tares: a Book of Verses (1884; first edition carries