Finishing Touches

Susannah Clapp

  • Charlotte Mew and her Friends by Penelope Fitzgerald
    Collins, 240 pp, £12.95, July 1984, ISBN 0 00 217008 6
  • The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Vol. I: 1903-17 edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott
    Oxford, 376 pp, £15.00, September 1984, ISBN 0 19 812613 1

On 24 March 1928 Charlotte Mew killed herself by drinking a bottle of disinfectant in a nursing-home near Baker Street. She left behind her a volume of poems, a number of uncollected essays and short stories, and instructions that after her death her main artery should be severed: she had thought a lot about being buried alive. Local newspapers reported the ‘suicide whilst of unsound mind’ of ‘Charlotte New, a writer of verse’, and of ‘Charlotte Mew, said to be a writer’.

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