Mew was born in Bloomsbury, London, the daughter of Anna Kendall and the architect Frederick Mew, who designed Hampsteadtown hall. The marriage produced seven children. Charlotte, nicknamed Lotti by her family, attended Gower Street School, where she became infatuated with the school's headmistress, Lucy Harrison, and lectures at University College London. Her father died in 1898 without making adequate provision for his family; two of her siblings suffered from mental illness and were committed to institutions, and three others died in early childhood, leaving Charlotte, her mother, and her sister Anne. Charlotte and Anne made a pact never to marry for fear of passing on insanity to their children. Through most of her adult life, Mew wore masculine attire and kept her hair short, adopting the appearance of a dandy.
Writing career
In 1894, Mew succeeded in getting a short story published in The Yellow Book. Five years followed without any publications, but by the beginning of the 20th century she was contributing fiction with some regularity to magazines, including Temple Bar. She apparently wrote very little poetry until the 1910s. Her first collection, The Farmer's Bride, was published in 1916 in chapbook format by the Poetry Bookshop; in the United States this collection was entitled Saturday Market and published in 1921 by Macmillan. It earned her the admiration of Sydney Cockerell and drew popular respect for her as a poet. Her poems are varied: some of them are passionate discussions of faith and the possibility of belief in God; others are proto-modernist in form and atmosphere. Many of her poems are in the form of dramatic monologues, and she often wrote from the point of view of a male persona. Two concern mental illness - "Ken" and "On the Asylum Road". Many of Mew's poems, including "Ken", "The Farmer's Bride", and "Saturday Market", are about outcast figures, expressing Mew's feelings of alienation from the community in which she lived. Her poem "The Trees Are Down" is a poignant plea for ecological sensitivity and is singled out particularly in the anthology The Green Book of Poetry by Ivo Mosley. Mew gained the patronage of several literary figures, notably Thomas Hardy, who called her the best woman poet of her day; Virginia Woolf, who said she was "very good and interesting and quite unlike anyone else"; and Siegfried Sassoon. In 1923, she obtained a Civil List pension of £75 per year with the aid of Cockerell, Hardy, John Masefield, and Walter de la Mare. This helped ease her financial difficulties.
Decline and death
After the death of her sister from cancer in 1927, she descended into a deep depression and was admitted to a nursing home where she eventually committed suicide by drinking Lysol, a disinfectant. Mew is buried in the northern part of Hampstead Cemetery, London NW6.
