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Charlotte Mew |
Charlotte Mew suffered a childhood that cast painful shadows across her life. Three siblings died and another brother and younger sister were committed to asylums. In her thirties, she published stories in The Yellow Book and elsewhere, but it was her poetry, strange, haunting, and marked with death, that gained her friends, recognition, and a little money. Thomas Hardy called her the best woman poet of the day and got her a government pension.
But she was lonely. Her affections ran to other women but were never requited. And after the death of her mother, her sister, and her good friend Hardy, she was admitted to a nursing home where, fearing the onset of insanity, she drank a bottle of undiluted disinfectant and died.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |