Charlotte Mew

Charlotte Mary Mew (15 November 1869 – 24 March 1928) was an English poet, whose work spans the cusp between Victorian poetry and Modernism.

She was born in Bloomsbury, London the daughter of the architect Frederick Mew, who designed Hampstead town hall, and Anna Kendall.The marriage produced seven children. Charlotte, nicknamed Lotti by her family, attended Gower Street School, where she became infatuated with the school's headmistress, Lucy Harrison, and lectures at University College London. Her father died in 1898 without making adequate provision for his family; two of her siblings suffered from mental illness, and were committed to institutions, and three others died in early childhood leaving Charlotte, her mother and her sister, Anne. Charlotte and Anne made a pact never to marry for fear of passing on insanity to their children. (One author calls Charlotte "almost certainly chastely lesbian)". Through most of her adult life, Mew wore masculine attire and kept her hair short, adopting the appearance of a dandy.

In 1894, Mew succeeded in getting a short story published in The Yellow Book, and became a frequent contributor of fiction to the magazine but wrote very little poetry at this time. Her first collection of poetry, The Farmer's Bride, was published in 1916, in chapbook format, by the Poetry Bookshop; in the United States this collection was entitled Saturday Market and published in 1921 by Macmillan. It earned her the admiration of Sydney Cockerell and drew popular respect for her as a poet.

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