Fembio Special: Famous Lesbians
Charlotte Mew
(Charlotte Mary Mew)
born on November 15, 1869 in London, Great Britain
died on March 24, 1928 in London, Great Britain
British writer and poet
155th birthday on November 15, 2024
Biography
Called Lotti by her family, Charlotte Mew was born the third of seven children. Her father was the architect Frederick Mew, who had married his partner's daughter Anna Kendall. Three of the children died young, and one sister and one brother were later admitted to psychiatric institutions with schizophrenia. Charlotte maintained a close relationship with her remaining sister, Anne, throughout her life. The co-owner of the Poetry Bookshop, Alida Monro, who was a friend of Charlotte’s, later explained that the two sisters decided early on not to marry because they feared they might pass on the illness. The subject was to weigh heavily on Mew: she wrote about it several times in poems such as “Ken,” and in the poem “On the Asylum Road” she refers to those affected as “the saddest crowd that you will ever pass.”
An important person in her childhood was Elizabeth Goodman, who worked for the family for 26 years as a nanny and whom she lovingly described in an article entitled “An Old Servant” that was published in the New Statesman in 1913. Their nanny, as Mew described her, was an all-knowing master of everything; yet she was regarded by Charlotte and her siblings as one of their own kind, and not as an adult. It was, however, also the nanny who instilled in Charlotte an awareness of guilt and revenge in the spirit of the Gospel.
From 1882, Charlotte Mew attended Gower Street School, where she fell madly in love with its principal, Lucy Harrison. When Harrison had to give up her post in 1883 for health reasons, Mew was at first beside herself with grief. But Harrison continued to teach some of her favorite students, including Charlotte Mew. It was from her that Charlotte learned above all temperance and self-discipline and also acquired a love of English literature. She would later write about Emily Brontë's poetry and Mary Stuart in literature in several newspaper articles.
Mew then attended lectures at University College London. She played both the organ and the piano and was well-read in English and French literature. While her sister Anne trained as a painter at the Queen's Square Female School of Art, she turned to writing. She made her debut in 1894 with the short story “Passed,” which was published in the July issue of the British literary and art magazine Yellow Book, widely considered the best art magazine of the time. Further stories, articles and poems appeared in various magazines.
The two sisters moved in a circle of friends that included numerous women artists. Charlotte Mew was considered a “New Woman,” i.e. she moved freely about town on her own, smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, wore a tie, cut her hair short and swore. She and her friends did not see themselves as bohemians, but as dandies.
After the death of her brother in 1901, Mew left London and traveled with the writer Ella D'Arcy to Paris and Brittany, where she spent some time with five other women in the St. Gilda de Rhuys convent. She later wrote about these experiences in her article “Notes in a Brittany Convent” and the poem “The Little Portress.”
However, her mother did not like the daughters being far from home for so long, and Charlotte returned to London at her request. The bond with her family was more important to Charlotte Mew than her need for freedom. She then began to devote herself increasingly to poetry.
One of the admirers of her work was May Sinclair, who was already a well-known writer. The two were friends from 1913 to 1916. Sinclair was an important source of inspiration for Mew, whose most productive phase fell during the time of their friendship. Sinclair ensured that Mew's work was noticed by other critics, such as Ezra Pound, who placed Mew's poem “Fin de fête” in The Egoist, a literary periodical that published classical modernist poetry and prose.
The friendship with Sinclair ended when Mew fell - unrequitedly - in love with her. Mew had close friendships with the founder of PEN, Catherine Amy Dawson-Scott, as well as with Alida Klemantaski, who was married to the publisher Harold Monro and ran the Poetry Bookshop with him. Harold Monro arranged for the publication of her first book: The Farmer's Bride was published in 1916 with seventeen poems in an edition of 500 copies. Although sales of the volume were slow, it made the author known to a number of luminaries on the literary scene, who gave her enthusiastic reviews, such as H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Rebecca West. A second edition, expanded by eleven poems, appeared in 1921 and was published in the United States in the same year under the title Saturday Market. It was not until 1929 - a year after her death - that her second volume of poetry, The Rambling Sailor, was also published by Poetry Bookshop.
Her poems convey isolation and misunderstandings, and the focus is often on women who for various reasons do not fulfill the heterosexual role and yet who also experience no positive alternative.
Mew herself was considered somewhat eccentric. As a regular visitor to the Poetry Bookshop, where she could be herself and not have to prove anything to anyone, she was called Auntie Mew.
After their mother died in 1922, the two Mew sisters moved into Anne’s studio. Shortly thereafter Anne fell ill with liver cancer and died in 1927. A year later, Charlotte herself went into a nursing home, where she committed suicide a month later.
Although Charlotte Mew was denied her big breakthrough during her lifetime, her works are still being reprinted today.
(Text from 2018; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024.
Please consult the German version for additional information, pictures, sources, videos, and bibliography.)
Quotes
I have got Charlotte Mew’s book, and I think her very good and interesting and unlike anyone else.
(Virginia Woolf, letter to R.C. Trevelyan, January 25, 1920)
Charlotte Mew (the greatest living poetess)
(Virginia Woolf, letter to Vita Sackville-West, November 9, 1924)
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