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.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Burdened with family cares and pinched finances in her adult years, British poet Mew (1869-1928) also had to struggle against Victorian strictures and her own repressed lesbianism, while trying to create her distinctive works. PW described this biography, which includes selections from the poet's masterworks, as "wrenching." Photos.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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