Charlotte Mew

"A tantalising, touching story. An entire life's emotional history in a short space."
VICTORIA GLENDINNING, 'Sunday Times'

Charlotte Mew (1869 – 1928) was a poet with a formidable reputation who, Thomas Hardy declared, was 'far and away the best living woman poet' and who wrote some of the finest English poems of the twentieth century. Her private life, to all appearances, was content and respectable: she was a dutiful daughter, living at home in late Victorian Bloomsbury, waiting, with the help of a sister, on a monster of an old mother. The proprieties had to be observed and no-one suspected that the Mews had no money, that two siblings were insane and that Charlotte was a lesbian, living in the dark thrill of self-inflicted frustration.

On all this Charlotte put a brave face, but despite literary success and a passionate, enchanting personality, eventually the conflicts within her drove her to despair, and she killed herself by drinking a glass of the household disinfectant, Lysol, the cheapest poison available.

In this unexpectedly gripping portrait of 'Bloomsbury's saddest poet', Penelope Fitzgerald brings all her novelists skills into play. The story she tells is a tragic one, but the book is full of the love of life.

"Moving and vivid. Her story reads like a Victorian melodrama"
RACHEL BILLINGTON, 'Financial Times'

"A sad story, beautifully told."
MARK GIROUARD, 'Guardian'

"Everyone says you can't write the biography of a genius. Penelope Fitzgerald has…and she has managed to present Charlotte Mew with such subtlety that you feel you've read her work, even if you haven't."
PATRIC DICKINSON, 'The Times'

WITH A SELECTION OF CHARLOTTE MEW'S POEMS