Charlotte Mew

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

Charlotte Mew
Born
Charlotte Mary Mew

15 November 1869
Bloomsbury, London, England
Died24 March 1928 (1928-03-25) (aged 58)
London, England, United Kingdom
Notable work
The Farmer's Bride

Early life and education

Mew was born in Bloomsbury, London, the daughter of Anna Kendall and the architect Frederick Mew, who designed Hampstead town hall.[1][2] The marriage produced seven children. Charlotte, nicknamed Lotti by her family, attended Gower Street School, where she became infatuated with the school's headmistress, Lucy Harrison,[3] and lectures at University College London.[4] Her father died in 1898 without making adequate provision for his family; two of her siblings suffered from mental illness and were committed to institutions, 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 on insanity to their children. (One author calls Charlotte "almost certainly chastely lesbian".)[5] Through most of her adult life, Mew wore masculine attire and kept her hair short, adopting the appearance of a dandy.[6]

Writing career

In 1894, Mew succeeded in getting a short story published in The Yellow Book.[7] Five years followed without any publications, but by the beginning of the 20th century she was contributing fiction with some regularity to magazines, including Temple Bar.[8] She apparently wrote very little poetry until the 1910s. Her first collection, The Farmer's Bride, was published in 1916 in chapbook 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 and drew popular respect for her as a poet.[9]

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 in form and atmosphere ("In Nunhead Cemetery"). 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.[10] 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.

Mew gained the patronage of several literary figures, notably Thomas Hardy, 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";[11] and Siegfried Sassoon. In 1923, she obtained a Civil List pension of £75 per year with the aid of Cockerell, Hardy, John Masefield, and Walter de la Mare.[12] This helped ease her financial difficulties.

Decline and death

After the death of her sister from cancer in 1927, she descended into a deep depression and was admitted to a nursing home where she eventually committed suicide[13] by drinking Lysol, a disinfectant.

Mew is buried in the northern part of Hampstead Cemetery, London NW6.[14]

References
  1. Hampstead - Local Government | British History Online
  2. Warner, Val, ed. Collected Poems and Selected Prose of Charlotte Mews. New York: Routledge, 2003, p. ix.
  3. Fitzgerald, Penelope, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1988, p. 28.
  4. Spender, Dale, and Janet Todd, eds, British Women Writers: An Anthology from the Fourteenth Century to the Present. New York: Bedrick Books, 1989, p. 695.
  5. Rice, Nelljean McConeghey (2003). A New Matrix for Modernism: A Study of the Lives and Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wikham. Routledge. p. 35. ISBN 0-415-94140-7.
  6. Rice, p. 6.
  7. Mew, Charlotte M. (1894). Passed. The Yellow Book. 2. London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane. pp. 121–41.
  8. Fitzgerald, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (New York, 1988), p. 66.
  9. Fitzgerald, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (New York, 1988), p. 102.
  10. Fitzgerald, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (New York, 1988), p. 139.
  11. Fitzgerald, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (New York, 1988), p. 180.
  12. Rice, Nelljean McConeghey (2003). A New Matrix for Modernism: A Study of the Lives and Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wikham. Routledge, p. 35.
  13. Warner, Val. "Mary Magdalene and the Bride: The Work of Charlotte Mew". Retrieved 2 June 2009.
  14. 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

Further reading

  • Penelope Fitzgerald (2002), Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, Flamingo.
  • Charlotte Mew: Selected Poetry and Prose, edited with an introduction and notes by Julia Copus. London: Faber, 2019
  • Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 19: British Poets, 1880–1914. London, 1983
  • Charlotte Mew: Collected Poems and Prose, edited with an introduction by Val Warner. London, 1981
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