Charlotte Mew
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Charlotte Mew (November 15, 1869 – March 24, 1928) was an English poet.
She was born in Bloomsbury, London, the daughter of an architect, Frederick Mew, who designed Hampstead town hall. He died early in her career. Two of her siblings suffered from mental illness and were committed to institutions, leaving Charlotte and her sister, Anne, who made a pact never to marry for fear of passing on insanity to their children. Charlotte wrote about the subject in several poems. Her own inclinations may have been towards lesbianism; she was strongly influenced by her first schoolmistress, and became deeply attracted to Ella D'Arcy, a writer she met through her first publisher, as well as to the author May Sinclair.
In 1894, she succeeded in getting a short story into The Yellow Book, but wrote very little poetry at this time. Her first collection of poetry, The Farmer's Bride, was published in 1916, in chapbook format, by the Poetry Bookshop; in the USA, it was entitled Saturday Market and published in 1921. It earned her the admiration of Sydney Cockerell. 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 favoured bucolic scenes, and often used the countryside in a Blakeian way, to suggest shifting emotional states and the chthonic round. Charlotte 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 quite unlike anyone else', and Siegfried Sassoon, and obtained a small Civil List pension with the aid of Cockerell, Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare. This helped ease her financial difficulties, but she never achieved the level of fame her patrons felt she deserved. The death of her sister caused her to descend into depression, and she was admitted to a nursing home where she committed suicide by drinking disinfectant.
References
- Penelope Fitzgerald (2002) Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, Flamingo.
- Charlotte Mew Chronology [1]
- Charlotte Mew in her own words [2]