(Charlotte Mew's poems explore a wide range of themes, inc...)
Charlotte Mew's poems explore a wide range of themes, including passionate discussions of faith and the possibility of belief in God and proto-modernism.
(In her tragically short life, Charlotte Mew produced poet...)
In her tragically short life, Charlotte Mew produced poetry that was intense, emotional, original, and praised by her contemporaries Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, Thomas Hardy, and Virginia Woolf.
(There has been increased and justified interest in the po...)
There has been increased and justified interest in the poetry of Charlotte Mew as she is seen increasingly as the leading English female poet of her generation. Her tragic personal life and her ambivalent sexuality are reflected in poems which hark back to the past, but at times, in their experiments in form and stream of consciousness, offer a clear and intriguing fore-taste of modernism.
Charlotte Mew was a British poet and short story writer. Charlotte Mew is reckoned as one of the great English poetesses whose works have long impressed and touched the readers' inner beings. Mew’s passionate writing brought her encouragement and backing from several notable literary figures including Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf.
Background
Charlotte Mew was born on November 15, 1869, in London, England, the United Kingdom, into a family of seven children in which she was the eldest daughter. She was the first girl born to Frederick Mew and Anna Maria Kendall.
Originally from the Isle of Wight, Frederick Mew had been sent to London by his father to train as an architect. He became an assistant to architect H. E. Kendall, Jr. In 1863, he married Kendall’s daughter, Anna Maria. Anna Maria, an invalid much of her life, saw her marriage as beneath her. Frederick’s death in 1898 put the family into a financial crisis.
Of the seven Mew children, only Charlotte, her older brother, Henry, and two younger siblings, Anne and Freda, survived to adulthood. Henry and Freda were both institutionalized for mental illness, a situation that strained the family’s limited resources and haunted Mew’s poetry.
Following her father’s death, Mew lived with her sister Anne and her mother at Gordon Street. Eventually, they lived in the basement, having rented out the upper rooms for additional income. Mew was particularly devoted to Anne, a painter who attended the Royal Female School of Art and later rented a studio, 6 Hogarth Studios.
Education
Mew attended Gower Street School and later lectures at University College, London.
Mew published her first work when she was in her mid-twenties. Although today she is best remembered for her poetry, she also wrote a number of short stories, including this first published work titled "Passed," which appeared in the new journal Yellow Book, in 1894. Inspired by Mew's volunteer social work, the story is narrated by a woman who, while visiting a church, happens upon an unsightly scene. A desperate prostitute leads her into a room where another woman, the prostitute's sister, lies dead. The narrator tries to comfort the grieving woman for a while until fear causes her to flee back to the security of her own home. Trying hard to forget the awful experience, the narrator is unexpectedly confronted by it again when she sees the same woman on the street wearing a red dress and accompanied by a man. The moment causes the narrator to break down because she can no longer turn a blind eye to the social ills all around her.
In 1898 Mew's father passed away, leaving the family in financial straits and putting them in the embarrassing position of having to rent out the top floor of the family home. Mew continued to publish her short fiction sporadically in journals like the Yellow Book, Temple Bar, Englishwoman, the Egoist, and the Chapbook over the next decade or so. However, she would gain her first real attention with the publication of a poem, "The Farmer's Bride," in the Nation in 1912. Having previously only published seven pieces of poetry in various journals, this work established her literary reputation. The narrative poem tells the story of a farmer and his young wife. The farmer is determined to win the love and affection of his hesitant bride, but instead, they become even more isolated from each other. The poem ends with none of the farmer's desires fulfilled, and he is left lonely, yearning for his wife.
With the publication of this poem, Mew began to be asked to participate in readings and introduced to influential people in the literary community of London. Once Mew was introduced into this world, she was quick to gain attention and friends, partly because of her unusual style and mannerisms which turned many heads. She was a tiny woman with short hair who wore tailored men's suits and always carried a black umbrella. She is thought to have had lesbian tendencies though there is no evidence of any sexual relationships with other women. Her initiation into a circle of writers did, however, incite the most prolific period of poetry writing in her career. Most notable from this time are the poems "Madeleine in Church" and "The Fete," published in the Egoist in 1914. The latter centers on a sixteen-year-old boy who tells about the life-altering experience he had of spending a night with a circus performer.
These works were included in Mew's first collection of poetry titled The Farmer's Bride, published in a small edition by Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop in 1916. Though the mere five hundred-volume printing took years to sell out, it nonetheless won Mew praise from the literary community, most notably from Siegfried Sassoon, Sara Teasdale, Ezra Pound, Thomas Hardy, and Virginia Woolf who called Mew "the greatest living poetess." In 1921 this collection was enlarged and reprinted under the title Saturday Market for distribution in both England and the United States. This edition received considerably more attention and was praised by critics like W. S. Braithwaite, who wrote in the Boston Transcript, "The very tight intellectual web of these poems takes nothing from the beautiful and impressive imagery with which they are packed. This expanded edition... is precious with the freight of a promise that is going to make the arrival of genius."
Despite the success of The Farmer's Bride, it did not earn Mew enough money to live on. After Mew’s death, her friend Alida Monro (wife of Harold Monro, who released Mew’s first book) collected and edited Mew’s poetry for publication. The Rambling Sailor appeared in 1929 and brings together her early work with her more mature and successful poetry from the teens and twenties.
Though Mew's most eminent works are mostly poems, her short stories appeared early and were published since 1894. In her fiction, there is a scare indication of right and wrong. Her depictions of characters, incidents and the plots are realistic, with collaboration of a variety of dialects, social classes and voices from different walks of life. Her works unveils her sense of ethics, morality, her ambivalent attitude toward religion, involving symbolism and color treatment to demonstrate the imagery, her observation, her doubts about life and her depression that was brought about by consecutive bereavement of loving her beloved family. Many of Mew's poems are in the form of dramatic monologues, and she often wrote from the point of view of a male persona.
Mew's most well-known works are her poems: Madeleine in Church (1913), The Fete (1916) and The Farmer's Bride (1916), which won her literary recognition and friends. Madelene in Church is a monologue that discloses her sin, her love, the unfaithful and her frustration in finding peace with the past and the present, the church and her life. The Fete renders a boy's reminiscence of an unusual encountering with circus bareback rider, which leads him to a point of no return and a very different perspective toward life. The Farmer's Bride narrates the frustration of a farmer that determines to keep his newlywed wife and makes her love him, only to find that alienation, exasperation and desolate status that is smothering the life.
Penelope Fitzgerald concluded that Mew was not obsessed with death even though she has made death her themes in most of her works. Mew's imagery-enriched poems may have aroused attention and critical review because of the unconventional patterns of stanza and rhyme. Critic like Humbert Wolfs, however, still highly appreciates her works and believes that Mew's works are free of pretension and genuinely and faithfully present the truth and the realistic.
Quotations:
"There is something horrible about a flower;
This, broken in my hand, is one of those
He threw it in just now; it will not live another hour;
There are thousands more; you do not miss a rose."
"But still it was a lovely thing
Through the grey months to wait for Spring"
Personality
Charlotte Mew was a poet with a formidable reputation. Charlotte Mew was surrounded by mental ill-health and death from a young age. Three brothers died while she was still a child and two other siblings were committed to mental institutions. In 1923 literary friends used their influence to secure Mew a small government pension, but she became increasingly isolated and delusional. She entered a nursing home in 1928 but committed suicide by drinking disinfectant.
She wore men's clothing throughout her adult life and vowed never to marry (ostensibly for fear of passing on the mental illness that plagued her family). Some biographers surmise that she was a celibate lesbian.
Some of these personal difficulties may have been romantic. Mew was described as aloof and reserved (Harold Monro noted that it was the kind of reserve "that amounted to secretiveness"), perhaps in part because she was ashamed of her poverty, but biographers have speculated that on two occasions she was in love with women who rebuffed her. The first was Ella D'Arcy, a writer whom she knew during her Yellow Book days, and the second, later, was writer May Sinclair. These rejections were apparently tremendous blows to Mew.
Quotes from others about the person
Charlotte Mew was an extraordinary person and an even more extraordinary poet - as many of her contemporaries recognized. Thomas Hardy predicted that she would be "remembered when others are forgotten"; Siegfried Sassoon that "many will be on the rubbish heap when Charlotte’s star is at the zenith where it will remain"; and the poet laureate John Masefield said of Mew that "Hers is the one mind now living […] comparable to Emily Brontë’s for depth and fire…"
Interests
Writers
May Sinclair, Ella D'Arcy
Connections
Mew and her sister Anne vowed to remain childless so as not to transmit what they believed to be a family disorder.