Charlotte Mew by Julia Copus

 Julia Copus, This Rare Spirit, A Life of Charlotte Mew  (Faber)

Charlotte Mew's work wasn't in danger of disappearing but it might having been fading from view. I hadn't been a great admirer, thinking of her as something like Stevie Smith, perhaps, but a look at the poems recently in preparation for the arrival of this book and now reading it, I entirely take the point. This detailed, evocative biography with its useful insights into the poems and fiction, has done both Lotti and me great favours.

The poverty and mental illness in her family caused great difficulties, each exacerbating the other, one might think, but Charlotte is remembered as being cheerful and good company while not pursuing celebrity. Her friendship with Thomas and Florence Hardy was a genuine thing and one can see why they would have admired each other but she disdained unwelcome attention and got on with the real job in unadvatageous circumstances.

Those circumstances, in the late Victorian and subsequent periods, with the old attitudes to the position of women only very gradually beginning to relent, the treatment of the physically or mentally infirm and finely calibrated indices of 'respectability' are clearly set out by Julia who also doesn't entertain any of the speculation about Charlotte's sexuality or private life beyond recording who speculated about what. In the same way that Charlotte attended to her work, cared for it and knew its place, such things, if there even were any, are not the story and are 'between consenting adults in private'. For once, we can be grateful for that.

Mew's stance was that literary renown had nothing to do with personal celebrity.

 

I'm not aware of any previous critical work by Julia Copus but she shows herself to have a great talent for it, beginning with how she demonstrates the themes of the first published story, Passed, provide so much of what was to follow in the poems. Like Hardy, Edward Thomas and Larkin later, Charlotte became  known as a poet having first been a writer of prose. The traffic seems to be mostly in the opposite direction a hundred years or so later now that poetry would be the very last way any writer would choose to make a living. 

In her day she was as successful as any female poet, gaining the attention of Ezra Pound and more Modernist figures as she lived through that date in 1910 identified by Virginia Woolf as when 'human character changed'. She belongs to that perceived change, apparently too similar to Hardy to be entirely C20th but certainly ahead of her time and not Victorian either.

But grief and chronic mental instability run through her life and all about her. They have a destructive effect on the slight, increasingly white-haired figure who is taken for being ten years older than her actual age although Edith Sitwell wouldn't have been the most sympathetic of witnesses to that.

In the poems Sea Love and I Have Been Through the Gates, 

we encounter a dispirited figure in an empty landscape, standing among the ruins of an idyll they once believed in.

Her suicide, by drinking undiluted disinfectant, at the age of 59 seems to have been planned for some time. 

It is as moving and tragic a story as any poet's, not least for the quiet dignity of its subject when not all poets or artists have quite such a powerful claim on our sympathy. And not least either for the thorough, well-organized and beautifully-written job Julia Copus makes of it. I've read biographies of plenty of poets whose work I admired more and might have been expected to have more interest in but I haven't read many, hardly any, that were more memorable and worthwhile. Julia has done Charlotte a great service.

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Twice in the book, the adjective 'decent' is used to mean 'of an acceptable standard'. In about 1977, I used it in the same way in an 'A' level essay on Paradise Lost, explaining (as if I would know) how Milton created a 'decent picture of Hell'. I was told in the margin that this was not the right word, it then presumably still only properly being the opposite of 'indecent'. But times have changed and now it passes a Faber editor. Perhaps I was ahead of my time, too.