1. Charlotte Mary Mew was an English poet whose work spanned the eras of Victorian poetry and Modernism.
15 Facts About Charlotte Mew
1. 2.
Mew was born in Bloomsbury, London, daughter of the architect Frederick Mew, who designed Hampstead Town Hall, and Anna Maria Marden, daughter of architect H E Kendall, for whom Frederick Mew had previously worked as an assistant.
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Charlotte Mew's divided nature made these emotional disasters particularly painful because her ladylike side.
4.
Copus mentions that Charlotte Mew has "frequently been identified as a lesbian" including by Penelope Fitzgerald.
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Yet, she adds, there is a rumour that Charlotte Mew "conducted an illicit affair with Thomas Hardy".
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In 1894, Charlotte Mew succeeded in getting a short story published in The Yellow Book.
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Charlotte Mew later sees the woman, accompanied by a man, and this causes the narrator to break down, unable to ignore the social ills around her.
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Five years followed without any publications, but by the beginning of the 20th century Charlotte Mew was contributing fiction with some regularity to magazines, including Temple Bar.
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Charlotte Mew apparently wrote very little poetry until the 1910s.
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Charlotte Mew's poems are varied: some of them are passionate discussions of faith and the possibility of belief in God; others are proto-modernist in form and atmosphere.
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Charlotte Mew made experimental use of long, prose-like lines, and varieties of enjambment and indentation, which has been praised for its originality.
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Charlotte Mew's poem "The Trees Are Down" is a poignant plea for ecological sensitivity and is singled out particularly in the anthology The Green Book of Poetry by Ivo Mosley.
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Charlotte 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 interesting and quite unlike anyone else"; and Siegfried Sassoon.
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Charlotte Mew descended into a deep depression and was admitted to the Beaumont Street Nursing Home in Marylebone, where she committed suicide by drinking Lysol, a disinfectant.
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Charlotte Mew is buried in the northern part of Hampstead Cemetery in London.