Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Charlotte Mew
-
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.
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...
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
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
Catherine Carswell
In this chapter CC
also challenges the spite and unfairness of comments made by T. E. Lawrence
on Charlotte Mew
, and through her on [a]ll the women who ever wrote.
qtd. in
Carswell, Catherine. Lying Awake: An Unfinished Autobiography and Other Posthumous Papers. Editor Carswell, John, 1st ed., Secker and Warburg, 1950.
116
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...
Textual Features
Lady Margaret Sackville
In her title-poem LMS
asks, Dare I believe / That from so numb, So parched a source / New streams may come?
Sackville, Lady Margaret. Return to Song, and Other Poems. Williams and Norgate, 1943.
5
She writes that the rhythmic form of long, sweeping lines that she...
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...
Timeline
1 January 1913: Harold Monro opened the Poetry Bookshop at...
