Short story writer, poet.

15 November 1869  – 24 March 1928

A Tribute to Charlotte Mew by Shelli Castor

The eccentric, brilliant writer Charlotte Mary Mew (1869-1928) lived in Bloomsbury for most of her life. Born into the family home at 30 Doughty Street, Charlotte lived there until the age of 20, when her family moved to 9 Gordon Street. Charlotte’s youth was marked by family tragedies—the deaths of two of her brothers (a third brother had died before Charlotte’s birth) and her eldest brother Henry’s descent into schizophrenia, which precipitated his move to an asylum. Not surprisingly, the themes of death and separation recur frequently in Charlotte’s poetry and prose. The youngest sibling, Freda, also had schizophrenia and Charlotte herself suffered bouts of melancholy and intense anxiety. Charlotte and her sister Anne decided never to marry to avoid passing thispredilection to mental illness to any offspring.

Despite the family’s tragedies and Charlotte’s parents’ contentious marriage, there were bright spots in Charlotte’s early life. From roughly the ages of 10 to 17, she attended the Gower Street School, the successor to Bedford College School for Girls. Many of the girls Charlotte met there became lifelong friends. While Mew’s formal education ended in 1886, her family’s move to 9 Gordon Street, across the street from University College London, afforded her the opportunity to attend the university’s public lectures. As many of her school friends were attending UCL, Mew was frequently on campus. Most importantly for her later career, Mew was able to register for a ticket to the British Museum’s Reading Room, which was open to people 21 and over who had a sponsor to vouch for their character. Mew used the Reading Room’s resources to research and draft many of her works. Tickets to the Reading Room were valid for only six months. As Julia Copus notes in her biography of Mew, the author renewed hers intermittently for years and then regularly toward the end of her life. The last ticket she purchased expired a month before her death.

Mew’s literary career began in 1894, when her short story Passed was published in the journal The Yellow Book’s second issue. More short stories plus essays followed, including The China Bowl (1899), The Governess in Fiction (1899), A White Night (1903), and The Poems of Emily Bronte (1904). Mew is best known for her poems, especially The Farmer’s Bride and Madeleine in Church (both 1916). Most of these works deal, broadly speaking, with the marginalisation of women and a sense of isolation within contemporary society. A White Night captures Mew’s overarching feminist concerns, with Ella, the sister of the story’s voyeuristic male narrator, chastising him for his callousness regarding the ritual sacrifice of a young woman: ‘Oh, for you…it was a spectacle. The woman didn’t really count,’ As Bryn Gribben emphasizes, the story offers a broad cultural conception of ‘a gendered crime, instigated and perpetuated by a masculine notion of spectacle.’ A White Night, The Farmer’s Bride, and Madeleine in Church all contributed to the growing catalogue of New Woman literature that aimed to raise awareness of women’s second-class status and called for changes to the status quo, which involved a world entrenched in Victorian notions of respectability. These notions were stringently adhered to by Mew’s mother, including the belief that women should not work for pay but be devoted to their families, primarily through their roles as wives and mothers. While a woman writing for pay flouted these Victorian ideals, Mew’s foray into publishing her writings was fueled by the need to provide for her family during her father’s long illness and after his death, especially for her mentally disturbed siblings’ specialized care. This duality—of steadfastly supporting family but doing so in a way that challenged Victorian ideals of what it meant to be a woman—was a hallmark of Charlotte Mew’s unconventional life.

While her impetus for writing and publishing was maintaining her family, Mew’s sheer talent gained the admiration of many influential people, all of whom helped her professionally and personally: her future publisher Harold Munro and his future wife, Alida Klemantaski Munro; Fitzwilliam Museum director Sydney Cockerell and his artist wife Kate; author Thomas Hardy and his wife Florence and poet Siegfried Sassoon. Mew and Kate Cockerell would become especially close, and Mew would also become particularly good friends with Alida Munro and Florence Hardy. In late 1921, Sydney Cockerell decided to obtain a civil list pension for Mew in recognition of her contributions to British literature; he enlisted the help of Sassoon and Hardy and, in December 1923, the King awarded Mew a civil list pension due to the merit of her poetry.

While Mew’s steadfast group of friends provided consistent support, the deaths of her mother in 1923 and her beloved sister Anne in 1927 deeply affected her. After Anne died of cancer, Mew fell into a deep depression and was eventually admitted to a nursing home outside Bloomsbury. The bleak setting worsened Mew’s condition and, on March 24, 1928, she drank Lysol and passed away at the age of 58.

Bibliography

Copus, Julia; This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew (London: Faber & Faber Ltd, 2021)

Penelope Fitzgerald, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1988).

Gribben, Bryn. ‘Masculinity and spectacle in Mew’s ‘A White Night’: into the cave, not up the river.’ English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, vol. 49, no. 3, summer 2006, pp. 311+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A151200408/LitRC?u=utulsa_main&sid=googleScholar&xid=711f9980. Accessed 25 Feb. 2024.

Showalter, Elaine; ed., ‘Introduction.’ Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago, 1993): vii-xx.

Contributed by Shelli Castor, MA, University of Tulsa.

Read and listen to:

The Trees Are Down   Charlotte Mew     

—and he cried with a loud voice:
Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees—
(Revelation)

They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of the gardens.
For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of the branches as they fall,
The crash of the trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves,
With the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas,’ the loud common talk, the loud common laughs of the men, above it all.

I remember one evening of a long past Spring
Turning in at a gate, getting out of a cart, and finding a large dead rat in the mud of the drive.
I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a god-forsaken thing,
But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.

The week’s work here is as good as done. There is just one bough
On the roped bole, in the fine grey rain,
Green and high
And lonely against the sky.
(Down now!—)
And but for that,
If an old dead rat
Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never have thought of him again.
It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day;
These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem:
When the men with the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas’ have carted the whole of the whispering loveliness away
Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them.

It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the hearts of the planes;
Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,
In the March wind, the May breeze,
In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from the great seas.
There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;
They must have heard the sparrows flying,
And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying—
But I, all day, I heard an angel crying:
‘Hurt not the trees.’

The Trees Are Down: read by Fiz Marcus

MINI BIOGRAPHY

Education

Educated at Gower Street School, Bloomsbury, with headmistress Lucy Harrison. 

Attended lectures at University College London.

Some Key Achievements and Interests

Was an accomplished pianist and talented artist.

1894 Short story Passed published in The Yellow Book.

Poetry praised by Thomas Hardy, Siegfried Sassoon.

Issues

Lack of finance.

Suffered from mental health issues: Two mentally ill siblings were in asylums at great expense leaving little money for the rest of the family, three other siblings died in infancy. Her father’s death added to financial constraints.

Poems provoked controversy one compositor refusing to set Madeleine in Church deeming it blasphemous.

1927 Profoundly affected by the illness and death of her sister Anne from cancer.

1928 Committed suicide.

Connection to Bloomsbury

Born Doughty Street, Bloomsbury.

1890 Family moved to Gordon Street, Bloomsbury.

Poem The Trees are Down was written in response to the cutting down of plane trees in Endsleigh Gardens, Bloomsbury.

Female networks

sisters: Anna Maria, Anne and fREDA.

Close friend Alida Monro, Aline Harland, Catherine Amy Dawson Scott, Ethel Oliver, Evelyn Sharp, Chick sisters (Dorothy, Edith, Elsie, Mary, Harrietta), Winifred Oliver.

Difficult relationships with several women including Ella D’Arcy and May Sinclair.

Writing/Publications include:

Poem The Farmer’s Bride published in Nation 1912

1916 The Farmer’s Bride, Poetry Bookshop (London), revised and enlarged edition published as Saturday Market, Macmillan (New York City), 1921.

1929 The Rambling Sailor, edited by Alida Monro, Poetry Bookshop.

1953, 1954 Collected Poems, edited, with a memoir, by Monro, Duckworth (London), 1953, Macmillan, 1954.

1981 Charlotte Mew: Collected Poems and Prose, edited and with an introduction, by Val Warner, Carcanet, Virago (Manchester).

Legacy

2016 Blue Plaque erected at her home in Doughty Street.

Further reading:

Copus, Julia, This Rare Spirit: A life of Charlotte Mew, London: Faber, 2021

Charlotte Mew | Poetry Foundation

Mew, Charlotte Mary (1869–1928), poet | Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (oxforddnb.com)