Charlotte Mew Article Index for
Charlotte
Website Links For
Charlotte
 

Information About

Charlotte Mew




She was born in , and were committed to Institutions , and three others died in early childhood leaving Charlotte, her mother and her sister, Anne. Charlotte and Anne made a pact never to marry for fear of passing on insanity to their children.

In 1894, she succeeded in getting a Short Story into '' The Yellow Book '', but wrote very little poetry at this time. Her first collection of poetry, '' The Farmer's Bride '', was published in 1916, in Chapbook format, by the Poetry Bookshop ; in the USA , it was entitled ''Saturday Market'' and published in 1921. It earned her the admiration of Sydney Cockerell .

Her poems are varied: some of them (such as 'Madeleine in Church') are passionate discussions of faith and the possibility of belief in God ; others are proto- Modernist in form and atmosphere (' In Nunhead Cemetery '). Mew gained the patronage of several literary figures, notably Thomas Hardy , 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.

After the death of her sister, she descended into Depression , and she was admitted to a nursing home where she committed Suicide by drinking Lysol .


REFERENCES