Charlotte Mew and Her Friends with a Selection of Her Poems (Radcliffe Biography Series) [Unabridged] [Hardcover]

Penelope Fitzgerald (Author), Brad Leithauser (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1988

Penelope Fitzgerald's fascinating porttrait of Bloomsbury's saddest poet. Charlotte Mew (1869--1928) was a poet with a formidable reputation who, as Virginia Woolf put it, was 'very good and interesting and unlike anyone else' and who wrote some of the best English poems of the twentieth century. In her private life, to all appearances, she was a dutiful daughter living at home with a monster of an old mother. The proprieties had to be observed and no one must know that the Mews had no money, that two siblings were insane and that Charlotte was a secret lesbian, living a life of self-inflicted frustration. Despite literary success and a passionate, enchanting personality, eventually the conflicts within her drove her to despair, and she killed herself by swallowing household disinfectant. In this unexpectedly gripping portrait, Penelope Fitzgerald brings all her novelist's skills into play, giving us what Victoria Glendinning calls a 'tantalising, touching story!an entire life's emotional history in a short space'.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The life of British poet Charlotte Mew, 1869-1928, is wrenching in Fitzgerald's telling. Growing up in a London home saddened by the deaths of four of her infant siblings, Mew learned early about trouble, tragedies compounded when two other siblings became psychotic. Burdened with family cares and pinched finances in her adult years, she also had to struggle against Victorian strictures and repressed lesbianism, while trying to create her distinctive works. But she had helpful friends in Thomas and Florence Hardy, Henry and Alida Monro (of the renowned Poetry Bookshop) and others who recognized her talent. As Fitzgerald (Offshore, etc.) reveals, though, Mew suffered from an acute sense of unworthiness and, "in danger of passing from the neurotic to the psychotic," she committed suicide at age 59. The author includes selections from the poet's masterworks, which, one hopes, will generate new appreciation for Mew after years of inexplicable neglect. Photos.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

First published in London in 1984, this biography unveils the life, personality, and art of the almost-forgotten English poet Charlotte Mew (1869-1928), whose poetry impressed such contemporaries as Hardy, Woolf, Sitwell, and Pound. Fitzgerald brings Mew to life through accounts of the poet's interactions with her colleagues. By interrelating Mew's work and life experiences, Fitzgerald comments, and allows Mew to comment, on an inner struggle intensified by insanity, poverty, sexual frustration, and the death of loved onesa struggle that ends with suicide. This work is not only a study of Mew, the individual and poet, but of the literary climate of the time. A selection of Mew's poems is included.Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Lib., New Brunswick, N.J.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 276 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. (May 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201088959
• ISBN-13: 978-0201088953
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #942,163 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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