Charlotte Mew and Her Friends with a Selection of Her Poems (Radcliffe Biography Series) - Hardcover

Penelope Fitzgerald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0201088959 ISBN 13: 9780201088953

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1988

Synopsis

Penelope Fitzgerald's fascinating porttrait of Bloomsbury's saddest poet. Charlotte Mew (1869--1928) was a poet with a formidable reputation who, as Virginia Woolf put it, was 'very good and interesting and unlike anyone else' and who wrote some of the best English poems of the twentieth century. In her private life, to all appearances, she was a dutiful daughter living at home with a monster of an old mother. The proprieties had to be observed and no one must know that the Mews had no money, that two siblings were insane and that Charlotte was a secret lesbian, living a life of self-inflicted frustration. Despite literary success and a passionate, enchanting personality, eventually the conflicts within her drove her to despair, and she killed herself by swallowing household disinfectant. In this unexpectedly gripping portrait, Penelope Fitzgerald brings all her novelist's skills into play, giving us what Victoria Glendinning calls a 'tantalising, touching story!an entire life's emotional history in a short space'.

About this title

About the Author:

Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most elegant and distinctive voices in British fiction. Three of her novels, The Bookshop, The Beginning of Spring and The Gate of Angels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She won the Prize in 1979 for Offshore. Her last novel, The Blue Flower, was the most admired novel of 1995, chosen no fewer than nineteen times in the press as the `Book of the Year'. It won America's National Book Critics' Circle Award. She died in April 2000, at the age of eighty-three.

From Publishers Weekly:

The life of British poet Charlotte Mew, 1869-1928, is wrenching in Fitzgerald's telling. Growing up in a London home saddened by the deaths of four of her infant siblings, Mew learned early about trouble, tragedies compounded when two other siblings became psychotic. Burdened with family cares and pinched finances in her adult years, she also had to struggle against Victorian strictures and repressed lesbianism, while trying to create her distinctive works. But she had helpful friends in Thomas and Florence Hardy, Henry and Alida Monro (of the renowned Poetry Bookshop) and others who recognized her talent. As Fitzgerald (Offshore, etc.) reveals, though, Mew suffered from an acute sense of unworthiness and, "in danger of passing from the neurotic to the psychotic," she committed suicide at age 59. The author includes selections from the poet's masterworks, which, one hopes, will generate new appreciation for Mew after years of inexplicable neglect. Photos.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0201088959
• ISBN 13: 9780201088953
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 276