| Charlotte Mew |
Jane Weir
ISBN-13 978-1-906285-18-0
PB £4.50
Charlotte Mew was born in London in 1869, the eldest of four children. She grew up in an upper middle class Victorian family, attending Lucy Harrison's School for Girls in Gower Street and lectures at University College, London.
At the age of twenty-nine her father, an architect, died leaving the family in much reduced circumstances. Charlotte remained living in Bloomsbury with her mother and sister Anne.
Charlotte Mew wrote stories, essays, a play, The China Bowl, and poetry. Her stories were published in The Yellow Book and other journals including Temple Bar, The Egoist, The English Woman and The Nation.
Harold Monro at The Poetry Bookshop discovered her work and published two books of her verse, The Farmers Bride (1915) and The Rambling Sailor (1929). Charlotte Mew was a friend of the novelist May Sinclair, she was highly admired by many important literary figures of her period including Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon, Thomas Hardy, Walter de la Mare and John Masefield.
In 1923 she was awarded a Civil List pension, however in this same year her mother died, followed by her sister Anne in 1927. Charlotte despondent and depressed entered a London nursing home where she committed suicide by drinking a bottle of Lysol in 1928 at the age of forty-nine.
In this short monograph Jane Weir discusses the role that live performance played in the transmission and reception of Charlotte Mew's work.