Charlotte Mew

Charlotte Mary Mew was an English poet, born in 1869, whose work spans the period between Victorian poetry and Modernism.

She was born in Bloomsbury, London the daughter of the architect Frederick Mew. 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 “chastely lesbian”.)

In 1894, Mew succeeded in getting a short story into the literary journal ‘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.

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’). Mew gained the patronage of several literary figures, notably Thomas Hardy, who called her the best woman poet of her day. In the Observer Newspaper Humbert Woolf wrote of her:

“She has no tricks or graces… All that she wrote had its quality of depth and stillness. No English poet had less pretensions, and few as genuine a claim to be in touch with the source of poetry.”

After the death of her sister, she descended into a deep depression, and was admitted to a nursing home where she eventually committed suicide in 1928.