Charlotte Mary Mew (15 November 1869 – 24 March 1928) was an English poet whose work spanned the eras of Victorian poetry and

Modernism Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

Early life and education

Mew was born in

Bloomsbury Bloomsbury is a district in the West End of London, part of the London Borough of Camden in England. It is considered a fashionable residential area, and is the location of numerous cultural institution, cultural, intellectual, and educational ...

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

, daughter of the architect Frederick Mew (1833-1898), who designed

Hampstead Town Hall Hampstead Town hall is a municipal building on Haverstock Hill, Hampstead, London. It is a Grade II listed building. History The facility was commissioned by the Vestry of St John who had previously met in the offices of the local workhouse. A ...

, and Anna Maria Marden (1837-1923), daughter of architect H. E. Kendall, for whom Frederick Mew had previously worked as an assistant. Frederick was the son of an innkeeper on the

Isle of Wight The Isle of Wight (Help:IPA/English, /waɪt/ Help:Pronunciation respelling key, ''WYTE'') is an island off the south coast of England which, together with its surrounding uninhabited islets and Skerry, skerries, is also a ceremonial county. T ...

. The marriage produced seven children. Charlotte, nicknamed Lotti by her family, attended Gower Street School, where she was greatly influenced by the school's headmistress, Lucy Harrison, and attended lectures at

University College London University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...

. The family moved to 9, Gordon Street in 1888, living in "genteel near-poverty"; her father died in 1898 without making adequate provision for his family. Two of her siblings suffered from

mental illness A mental disorder, also referred to as a mental illness, a mental health condition, or a psychiatric disability, is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. A mental disorder is ...

and were committed to

institutions An institution is a humanly devised structure of rules and norms that shape and constrain social behavior. All definitions of institutions generally entail that there is a level of persistence and continuity. Laws, rules, social conventions and ...

, and three others died in early childhood, leaving Charlotte, her mother, and her sister Anne. Charlotte and Anne made a pact never to marry for fear of passing mental illness on to their children. Mew was likely a lesbian; according to

Penelope Fitzgerald Penelope Mary Fitzgerald (17 December 1916 – 28 April 2000) was a Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer from Lincoln, England. In 2008 ''The Times'' listed her among "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945". ''The Ob ...

's account in Mew's entry in the ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', after Mew's first short story was published in the '' Yellow Book'' journal, "she met and was deeply attracted to its dashing assistant editor, Ella D'Arcy. In 1902 she went to meet Ella in Paris, but the visit was a bitter disappointment. Ten years later she fell in love with the novelist May Sinclair, and apparently chased her into the bedroom, where she was humiliatingly rejected. Her divided nature made these emotional disasters particularly painful because her ladylike side ... totally disapproved of them." One scholar believes that Charlotte was "almost certainly chastely

lesbian A lesbian is a homosexual woman or girl. The word is also used for women in relation to their sexual identity or sexual behavior, regardless of sexual orientation, or as an adjective to characterize or associate nouns with female homosexu ...

". However, a more recent biography by the poet Julia Copus questions some of these assumptions about Charlotte Mew. Copus mentions that Mew has "frequently been identified as a lesbian" including by Penelope Fitzgerald. Yet, she adds, there is also a rumour that Mew "conducted an illicit affair with Thomas Hardy". Copus argues that "such hypotheses occur when there is a vacuum surrounding a writer’s private life; we do not like to accept that no evidence can be found – or indeed that there may have been no active love life at all." The matter, Copus continues, is further compounded by the fact that Mew was exceptionally private and omitted even to provide biographical notes for anthologies. Mew had a strong sense of style: her friend and editor Alida Monro remembers her wearing distinctive red worsted stockings in the winter months, and she insisted on buying her black, button-up boots (in a tiny size 2) from Pinet's bootmakers in Mayfair; items left to different friends in her will (such as a "small three drop diamond pendant" and a "scarlet Chinese embroidered scarf") also suggest a keen interest in fashion. In later years, she often dressed in masculine attire, adopting the appearance of a dandy. Another biography by Julia Copus questions this notion of Charlotte Mew as a dandy, suggesting her attire was not quintessentially "masculine" as has been claimed in the past.

Writing career

In 1894, Mew succeeded in getting a short story published in ''

The Yellow Book ''The Yellow Book'' was a British quarterly literary periodical that was published in London from 1894 to 1897. It was published at The Bodley Head Publishing House by Elkin Mathews and John Lane, and later by John Lane alone, and edited by th ...

.'' Entitled "Passed," it was inspired by Mew's activities as a volunteer social worker and concerns a distressed woman, suggested to be a prostitute, who leads the narrator to a room where her sister lies dead. The narrator is profoundly shocked by the experience, but flees in the end to her comfortable life. She later sees the woman, accompanied by a man, and this causes the narrator to break down, unable to ignore the social ills around her. Five years followed without any publications, but by the beginning of the 20th century Mew was contributing fiction with some regularity to magazines, including '' Temple Bar.'' She apparently wrote very little poetry until the 1910s. Her first collection, '' The Farmer's Bride'', was published in 1916 in

chapbook A chapbook is a type of small printed booklet that was a popular medium for street literature throughout early modern Europe. Chapbooks were usually produced cheaply, illustrated with crude woodcuts and printed on a single sheet folded into 8, 1 ...

format by the Poetry Bookshop; in the United States this collection was entitled ''Saturday Market'' and published in 1921 by Macmillan. It earned her the admiration of

Sydney Cockerell Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (16 July 1867 – 1 May 1962) was an English museum curator and collector. From 1908 to 1937, he was director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. He was knighted in 1934. Biography Sydney Cockerell m ...

and drew respect for her as a poet from writers such as Sara Teasdale,

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an List of poets from the United States, American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Ita ...

, and

Virginia Woolf Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer and one of the most influential 20th-century modernist authors. She helped to pioneer the use of stream of consciousness narration as a literary device. Vir ...

. Her poems are varied: some of them (such as "Madeleine in Church") are passionate discussions of faith and the possibility of belief in God; others are proto-

modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

in form and atmosphere (" In Nunhead Cemetery"). She made experimental use of long, prose-like lines, and varieties of enjambment and indentation, which has been praised for its originality. Many of her poems are in the form of dramatic monologues, and she often wrote from the point of view of a male persona (" The Farmer's Bride"). Two concern mental illness – "Ken" and "On the Asylum Road". Many of Mew's poems, including "Ken", "The Farmer's Bride", and "Saturday Market", are about outcast figures, expressing Mew's feelings of alienation from the community in which she lived. Her poem "The Trees Are Down" is a poignant plea for ecological sensitivity and is singled out particularly in the anthology ''The Green Book of Poetry'' by

Ivo Mosley Ivo Adam Rex Mosley (14 April 1951 – 31 January 2024) was a British writer, poet and potter. His career encompassed ceramics, poetry, social commentary, opera and musical theatre. In latter years his focus was works of non-fiction relating to p ...

. Mew gained the patronage of several literary figures, notably

Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Literary realism, Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry ...

, who called her the best woman poet of her day; Virginia Woolf, who said she was "very good and interesting and quite unlike anyone else"; and

Siegfried Sassoon Siegfried Loraine Sassoon (8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967) was an English war poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front (World War I), Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World ...

. In 1923, she obtained a

Civil List A civil list is a list of individuals to whom money is paid by the government, typically for service to the state or as honorary pensions. It is a term especially associated with the United Kingdom, and its former colonies and dominions. It was ori ...

pension of £75 per year with the aid of Cockerell, Hardy,

John Masefield John Edward Masefield (; 1 June 1878 – 12 May 1967) was an English poet and writer. He was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, Poet Laureate from 1930 until his death in 1967, during which time he lived at Burcot, Oxfordshire, near Abingdon ...

, and

Walter de la Mare Walter John de la Mare (; 25 April 1873 – 22 June 1956) was an English poet, short story writer and novelist. He is probably best remembered for his works for children, for his poem "The Listeners", and for his psychological horror short fi ...

. This helped ease her financial difficulties.

Decline and death

Despite the critical success of her work, Mew did not earn enough money to support herself as well as her mother and sister. In 1916, the house they lived in was condemned. After the death of her sister from cancer in 1927, Mew continued to live at 64,

Charlotte Street Charlotte Street is a street in Fitzrovia, historically part of the parish and borough of St Pancras, in central London. It has been described, together with its northern and southern extensions (Fitzroy Street and Rathbone Place), as the ' ...

Fitzroy Square Fitzroy Square is a Georgian architecture, Georgian garden square, square in London, England. It is the only one in the central London area known as Fitzrovia. The square is one of the area's main features, this once led to the surrounding di ...

. She descended into a deep depression and was admitted to the Beaumont Street Nursing Home in

Marylebone Marylebone (usually , also ) is an area in London, England, and is located in the City of Westminster. It is in Central London and part of the West End. Oxford Street forms its southern boundary. An ancient parish and latterly a metropo ...

, where she committed suicide by drinking

Lysol Lysol (, ; spelled Lizol in India) is an American brand of cleaning and Disinfectant, disinfecting products distributed by Reckitt, which markets the similar Dettol or Sagrotan in other markets. The line includes liquid solutions for hard and s ...

, a disinfectant. After Mew's death, her friend Alida Monro (who was married to Harold Monro, publisher of Mew's first book), collected and edited her poetry for publication as ''The Rambling Sailor'', released in 1929. Mew is buried in the northern part of Hampstead Cemetery in London.Wilson, Scott. ''Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons'', 3rd edn: 2 (Kindle Location 32265). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition

References

External links

* * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Mew, Charlotte 1869 births 1928 suicides 19th-century English women writers 20th-century English women writers 19th-century English poets 20th-century English poets 19th-century English writers Burials at Hampstead Cemetery English women poets People with mental disorders Poets with disabilities People from Bloomsbury Suicides by poison Suicides in Westminster Victorian poets Victorian women writers Chapbook writers 1928 deaths

Early life and education

Writing career

Decline and death

References

Further reading

External links