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“... 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 ...”

“... During her lifetime Charlotte Mew was either greatly liked or greatly disliked, and now, more than fifty years after her death, those who are interested in her are very much interested. There are at least two collections of her papers which nobody is given permission to see – not quite with the feeling that she ought to be left to rest in peace, but, rather, that she shouldn’t be shared indiscriminately with outsiders ...”

“... by Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury. In the event, however, she wrote a biography of Charlotte Mew, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, which was published, and reviewed in the LRB in 1984 – and will be reissued this summer.In 1927 Charlotte Mew was 58 and living ...”

“... it? Sixty years after Punch ran the poem, Knox’s daughter, Penelope Fitzgerald, published Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, in which she observed that her subject would always be an outsider. Twenty years ago Ian Hamilton wrote that Mew’s reputation ‘hangs by a thread’. Her Collected Poems and Prose has long ...”

“... was fading so fast from living memory that they might otherwise be lost for ever, or because, like Charlotte Mew, their achievement, though slight, was not negligible. ‘She did write at least one good poem, how many of us can say that?’ Fitzgerald wrote to Richard Ollard at Collins, who was pessimistic about the prospects for a biography. At odds with ...”

“... who found her too wary and easy to offend. The equally diffident, if yet more isolated poet Charlotte Mew courted Sinclair with a wrecker’s passion, but found herself rebuffed. Sinclair generally discouraged any kind of intimate approach, and chose to work in remote moorland retreats and inhospitable huts. She was occasionally ...”

“... one was, the other was, and that was almost always at home.’ Like Emily Brönte, Charlotte Mew and Eleanor Farjeon, she knew the greatest happiness of her hushed life-drama very early on. No wonder that the most radiant of her lyrics are the children’s verses of ‘Sing-Song’, or others that children readily understand (‘In the ...”

“... a threatened pastoral. Other writers, more diffident or isolated, threw in their lot with entropy: Charlotte Mew’s poetry of the early Twenties is littered with speakers on the verge of disappearance, clutching stillborn children as they sink into dream landscapes; Anna Wickham harbours fantasies of purgatorial fires raging over steeples and ...”

“... by Mirah in Daniel Deronda on Mary’s attempt to drown herself in the Thames. The roll-call of Charlotte Mew, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath is a reminder of other women writers who have preferred oblivion to the burden of great gifts and great unhappiness, as Wollstonecraft twice thought she did. Professor Butler ends her introduction with a quotation ...”

“... old vocabulary of Leavis and Stephen I-think-continually-of-those-who-were-truly-great Spender. Charlotte Mew, who was born on the edge of the square (and rather surprisingly does have a plaque), might have prompted some different adjectives. I wish Wade had said more about her unsettling talent. Both shrinking and dramatic, ...”

“... to forget her own afflictions when she sensed greater distress, she did all she could to help Charlotte Mew, whom she pitied and admired. ‘What a pathetic little creature! She has genius, I think.’ Though Hardy’s needs absorbed more of her energies as he grew older, Florence resisted his attempts to occupy her whole life. She was proud of what ...”

“... little considered. The wits. I would put her alongside Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stevie Smith, Charlotte Mew and Penelope Fitzgerald. All unflinching, elliptical, self-disguising. King quotes well from a terrific essay in which Bainbridge describes the surprise she got when she attended her brother’s funeral. She hadn’t realised he had been a ...”

“... In a tradition various enough to include Emily Dickinson, Mary Coleridge, Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Mew, her poetry gets on with itself, not self-absorbed but quite independent. Men poets, it makes one feel, get together too much, have too much of an eye for each other’s points and failings; and women have not shared in this tradition, with its ...”

“... again’, was the last Fitzgerald novel drawn from autobiographical experience. A third biography, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (1984), became what Lee calls ‘the crucial turning point’ – two others, on L.P. Hartley and the Poetry Bookshop of Harold Monro, were abandoned – after which came the four late novels, their settings derived almost ...”