Charlotte Mew

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Standard Name: Mew, Charlotte
Birth Name: Charlotte Mary Mew
Nickname: Lotti
Pseudonym: M.
Charlotte Mew is best known and regarded as an early twentieth century poet, though she also published a few short stories and essays. Her poems, often dramatic monologues, are haunted by unrequited love, the renunciation of passion, and death. Subtle experiment with form and metre is discernible in their unusually long lines, the frequent use of monosyllables, mixed metres, and repeated, irregular rhymes. CM 's work was admired by several poets of her day, notably Thomas Hardy , with whom she shares an affinity for harsh rural settings and socially isolated characters. Despite the enthusiasm of both initial and recent critics, her poetic achievements remain under-recognised.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
death Anna Wickham
Although AW 's suicide came with little warning, she showed, in an unfinished autobiography written more than ten years earlier, a portentous awareness of a tradition of suicide among women poets: There have been few...
Family and Intimate relationships Ella D'Arcy
Penelope Fitzgerald, biographer of the poet Charlotte Mew , describes her as deeply in love with EDA . Mew and EDA seem to have known each other through their contributions to The Yellow Book...
Friends, Associates G. B. Stern
GBS moved in literary and artistic circles in London before the first World War. She visited Rebecca West at Leigh-on-Sea in Essex in September 1917 during a week of air-raids.
Stern, G. B. Monogram. Chapman and Hall, 1936.
268ff
Several decades later she...
Friends, Associates May Sinclair
MS 's friendship with Charlotte Mew (whom she met through Catharine Dawson Scott in spring 1913) is still the subject of debate and disagreement among commentators. Mew kept the letters she received from her, but...
Friends, Associates Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
Charlotte Mew and CADS were close friends, despite Mew's sometimes anti-social behaviour. Dawson Scott tried hard to place Mew's poetry and to make literary connections for her.
Watts, Marjorie, and Frances King. Mrs. Sappho. Duckworth, 1987.
55
Friends, Associates Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
CADS 's biographer and daughter speculates that her friendship with Mew ended around this time, after Sinclair reportedly accused Mew (who is thought to have been bisexual) of bothering her. Dawson Scott wrote in her...
Literary responses Doreen Wallace
Gina and Alistair Wisker , in a literary note on DW , liken her poetry to that of Emily Brontë , Christina Rossetti , and Charlotte Mew .
Wisker, Alistair et al. “Introduction: A Literary Appreciation”. Doreen Wallace, 1897-1989: Writer and Social Campaigner, Edwin Mellen Press, Jan. 2000, p. xvii - xxi.
xviii
Literary responses Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre has become a sensitive barometer of feminist criticism. With its author it became the focus of Victorian women critics, including Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Charlotte Mew . Virginia Woolf admired the poetry of...
Textual Features H. D.
HD's reviews of poetry volumes for The Egoist show some of her literary principles already formed: the artist's responsibility to society as well as to art, her belief that art can stand against the selfishness...
Textual Features Carol Ann Duffy
Many poems here feature women answering back to canonical male voices: Liz Lochhead to Donne , Jenny Joseph to W. S. Gilbert , U. A. Fanthorpe to Walt Whitman , Wendy Cope to A. E. Housman
Textual Features Viola Meynell
This includes letters from Charlotte Mew , Henry James , and Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson .
Textual Features May Sinclair
Like May Cannan (different though Cannan's idiom is), MS continued to express her regret over her exclusion from the via dolorosa of the war: like an unloved hand laid on a beating heart / Our...
Textual Features May Sinclair
Defending H.D. against Harold Monro 's criticism, MS insisted that the Imagist style was unique for sheer emotion, for clean-cut and perfect beauty.
qtd. in
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press, 2000.
196
Nevertheless, she hedged her bets by telling Charlotte Mew that her...
Textual Features Fleur Adcock
Again her introduction is interesting and trenchant. She observes that the early twentieth century already feels remote. Her selection runs from Charlotte Mew (born in 1869) to a clutch of women a little over thirty:...
Textual Features Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
The Headland was strongly influenced by the writing of Dorothy Richardson , whom Dawson Scott had met in Cornwall during the first world war. Its story takes three chapters for three cataclysmic days. The protagonist...

Timeline

1 January 1913: Harold Monro opened the Poetry Bookshop at...

Writing climate item

1 January 1913

Harold Monro opened the Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street (now Boswell Street) in Bloomsbury.
Fitzgerald, Penelope. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends. Collins, 1984, p. 240 pp.
142-9
Grant, Joy. Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967.
60, 81-3

Texts

Monro, Alida, and Charlotte Mew. “Charlotte Mew—A Memoir”. Collected Poems of Charlotte Mew, Gerald Duckworth, 1953, p. vii - xx.
Mew, Charlotte. Collected Poems and Prose. Editor Warner, Val, Carcanet and Virago, 1981.
Mew, Charlotte, and Alida Monro. Collected Poems of Charlotte Mew. Gerald Duckworth, 1953.
Mew, Charlotte. “Introduction”. Collected Poems and Prose, edited by Val Warner, Carcanet and Virago, 1981, p. ix - xxii.
Monro, Alida, and Charlotte Mew. “Introductory Note”. The Rambling Sailor, Poetry Bookshop, 1929, pp. 7-8.
Mew, Charlotte. The Farmer’s Bride. Poetry Bookshop, 1916.
Mew, Charlotte, and Alida Monro. The Rambling Sailor. Poetry Bookshop, 1929.