Charlotte Mew's Aftereffects

Mew and Literary History

Few modern writers have proved as hard to place, both culturally and historically, as Charlotte Mew (1869–1928), the English author whose faltering attempts at securing her literary reputation, which began in the mid-1890s, only came to fruition a generation later when her second, expanded edition of The Farmer's Bride (1921)—the only book she published in her lifetime—won plaudits on both sides of the Atlantic. While scholars have frequently drawn attention to the accolades that Mew's poetry received from both established figures such as Thomas Hardy ("the greatest poetess I have come across lately") and younger authors such as Virginia Woolf ("very good and interesting and unlike anyone else"), they have reached little consensus about the period or movement to which Mew belongs.¹ On the one hand, critics have categorized Mew as a distinctly fin-de-siècle figure whose career remains firmly rooted in the literary ethos of the 1890s and early 1900s: the decades when most of her early publications were short stories and essays that appeared in a diverse range of late-Victorian periodicals, including Henry Harland's decadent Yellow Book, W. E. Henley's imperialist Outlook, and that bastion of middle-class taste, Temple Bar. On the other hand, readers have claimed Mew as a female modernist whose poetic innovations developed in the 1910s, even if her revisions of conventional prosody were not of the kind that readily linked her with Imagism: the short-lived movement that for T. S. Eliot defined the "point de repère" that marked "the starting-point of modern poetry."² Such commentaries support this observation by pointing out that the Egoist, the journal that gave greatest prominence to Imagism in Britain, took serious interest in Mew's idiosyncratic work.³

The difficulty in locating Mew's literary-historical position is evident in several important feminist studies that have contributed to the scholarly recovery of women's writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her significant assessment of women's poetry written between the 1820s and the 1910s, Angela Leighton asserts that "in spirit Charlotte Mew is one of the last Victorians," mostly because the "sensibility and imagery" of her writing "looks back to the women poets"—such as Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, and Alice Meynell—"who preceded her."⁴ Meanwhile, to Elaine Showalter, Mew fits more squarely within the group that she calls the "daughters of decadence."⁵ This cohort of flâneuses, New Women, and emergent suffragists produced sexually risk-taking stories frequently issued by John Lane, the publisher who supported Harland's journal. By contrast, Celeste M. Schenck expresses discontent at the manner in which modern readers, no matter how much they acknowledge Mew's originality, "tend at the same time to censure her for her small, unoracular formalism."⁶ As a result, even feminist critics have been unable to "read beyond what they see as the rhythmical familiarity and rhyme to a strikingly unconventional content" whose insubordinate sexual politics makes Mew's output markedly post-Victorian.⁷ More recently, some researchers have sought to place Mew within an identifiable canon of modernist women's poetry (including work by Frances Cornford and Anna Wickham), one that, even if it does not break with fixed forms, is perceptibly—if not radically—"resisting femininity" of a conventional type.⁸ Such discussions occasionally put pressure on the idea that Mew's modernism can also be heard through the echoes that several of her monologues supposedly make in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922).⁹

In many respects, Mew's inimitable poetry—the at first "unintelligible" verse in "irregular but rhymed meter" that struck the Times Literary Supplement in 1916 as having the "grotesque inconsequence of dream"—creates problems for literary historians because it often dramatizes situations in which her speakers experience what it means to be out of sync with, if not out of place in, their worlds.¹⁰ Although her comparatively slender body of poetry contains a number of fairly conventional sonnets, ballads, and lyrics dating from the early 1900s, the writings on which Mew...