Charlotte Mew
Charlotte Mew was an English poet and writer born into a family marked by tragedy and mental health struggles. The oldest of seven siblings, she experienced the loss of three brothers in childhood and faced the mental illness of two others. Mew began her literary journey as a teenager, with her first story published in 1894. It wasn't until the early 1910s that she gained recognition, notably with her poem "The Farmer's Bride," which led to a chapbook of the same name published in 1916. Mew's poetry is characterized by dramatic monologues that explore themes of sadness, longing, and personal pain, reflecting her own emotional struggles, including her experiences as a lesbian. Her romantic relationships were often tumultuous, particularly with writer May Sinclair, whose public rejection of Mew deeply affected her. In the latter part of her life, following the deaths of her mother and sister, Mew's mental health deteriorated, leading to her tragic death in 1928. Her work continued to receive attention posthumously, highlighting her contributions to early 20th-century literature.
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Charlotte Mew
Poet
- Born: November 15, 1869
- Birthplace: London, England
- Died: March 24, 1928
- Place of death: London, England
Biography
Charlotte Mew was born the daughter of Frederick Mew, an architect, and Anna Maria Kendall Mew, whose own father headed Frederick Mew’s company. Charlotte Mew had six siblings, and she was the oldest of the children to survive into adulthood. Three of her brothers died as children, and one brother and one sister were committed for mental illness when they were in their twenties. Mew was raised strictly by the family’s nurse, Elizabeth Goodman, and she began writing poems and stories when she was a teenager. Her first publication came in 1894, when her story “Passed” was published by Henry Harland in The Yellow Book. Harland rejected Mew’s next submission, and the aspiring writer published very little in the next fifteen years.
She composed most of her poetry between 1909 and 1916, and she first caught the attention of readers and other writers in 1912, when her poem “The Farmer’s Bride” was published by Henry Massingham in The Nation. Four years later, after meeting Alida Klementaski and Harold Monro, Mew published her chapbook, also named The Farmer’s Bride, with their company, the Poetry Bookshop, when she was forty-seven years old. Although not a commercial success, The Farmer’s Bride captivated the Fitzwilliam Museum’s director, Sidney Cockerell, who passed on copies of the collection to literary friends. Among the writers who read and praised Mew’s work were Thomas Hardy, Siegfried Sassoon, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Vita Sackville-West.
Her poetry, known for its use of dramatic monologue, frequently revealed deep sadness, longing, loneliness, and fear, not surprising given her emotional struggles and experiences. Though she did not inform her writing with openly lesbian themes, Mew was widely known to indeed be a lesbian, and her personal life and relationships proved painful for her. She fell in love with writer Ella D’Arcy around 1898, but D’Arcy, a heterosexual woman, wanted nothing more than friendship with Mew, who gave up her pursuit in 1902.
Almost a decade later, Mew fell in love again, this time with novelist May Sinclair, and the relationship’s public demise was devastating for Mew. Sinclair, who had initially pursued Mew, then rejected Mew when Mew pronounced love. Sinclair proceeded to publicly announce her dismissal of Mew and to ridicule the poet widely. It is no surprise that even Mew’s love poems emit sorrowful hopelessness.
In the last years of her life, Mew stopped writing poetry, and she was dealt severe blows when her mother passed away in 1923 and her sister, with whom she had lived her entire life, died of liver cancer in 1927. Her mental state declined, and she was placed in a nursing home in February, 1928. She lived there only one month before her self-inflicted death, which she caused by drinking a bottle of disinfectant. Alida Klementaski Monro, who had been instrumental in publishing Mew’s chapbook more than a decade before, edited and published Mew’s posthumous volume, The Rambling Sailor, the year after the writer’s death.