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Charlotte Mew




She was born in Bloomsbury, London , the daughter of an architect, Frederick Mew, who designed Hampstead Town Hall . He died early in her career. Two of her siblings suffered from mental illness and were committed to institutions, leaving Charlotte and her sister, Anne, who made a pact never to marry for fear of passing on insanity to their children. Charlotte wrote about the subject in several poems. Her own inclinations may have been towards Lesbian ism; she was strongly influenced by her first schoolmistress, and became deeply attracted to Ella D'Arcy , a writer she met through her first publisher, as well as to the author May Sinclair .

In who called her the best woman poet of her day, Virginia Woolf , who said she was 'very good and quite unlike anyone else', and Siegfried Sassoon , and obtained a small Civil List pension with the aid of Cockerell, Hardy, John Masefield and Walter De La Mare . This helped ease her financial difficulties, but she never achieved the level of fame her patrons felt she deserved. The death of her sister caused her to descend into Depression , and she was admitted to a nursing home where she committed Suicide by drinking disinfectant.


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