Charlotte Mew

Charlotte Mew
Charlotte Mew in 1900
Born	Charlotte Mary Mew 15 November 1869 Bloomsbury, London, England
Died	24 March 1928 (1928-03-25) (aged 58) London, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Writer
Notable work	The Farmer's Bride (1916), The Rambling Sailor (1929)

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

Early life and education[]

The blue plaque at 30 Doughty Street, where she was born^[1]​

Mew was born in Bloomsbury, London, the daughter of Anna Maria Kendall and the architect Frederick Mew, who designed Hampstead Town Hall.^[2][3] 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,^[4] and attended lectures at University College London.^[5] 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,^[6] 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 speculates that Charlotte was "almost certainly chastely lesbian".)^[7] 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.^[8] In later years, she often dressed in masculine attire, adopting the appearance of a dandy.^[9]

Writing career[]

In 1894, Mew succeeded in getting a short story published in The Yellow Book.^[10] Entitled Passed its inspiration derived from Mew's activities as a volunteer social worker and concerns a sex worker, who leads the narrator to a room where the sex worker's sister lies dead. The narrator is profoundly shocked by the experience, but flees in the end to her comfortable life. Yet, she is later confronted by the woman again, accompanied by a man, and this causes the narrator to break down.^[11] 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.^[12] 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.^[13]

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"). She made experimental use of long, prose-like lines, and varieties of enjambment and indentation, which has been praised for its originality.^[14] 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 "". 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.^[15] 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";^[16] 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.^[17] 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 died by suicide^{[18] [19]}from drinking Lysol, a disinfectant.^[20]

Mew is buried in the northern part of Hampstead Cemetery, London NW6.^[21]

References[]

External links[]

• Media related to Charlotte Mew at Wikimedia Commons
• Works written by or about Charlotte Mew at Wikisource
• Works by or about Charlotte Mew at Internet Archive
• Works by Charlotte Mew at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)