Introduction: ‘The best living woman poet’

Charlotte Mew (1869–1928), a British poet and short story writer, allegedly kept two trunks full of manuscripts in her room at 9 Gordon Street in Bloomsbury, London, which she shared with her mother and sister Anne. Mew used to alarm those in her company by periodically withdrawing sheets of paper and rolling them up to light her cigarettes or by feeding small pieces to the family parrot Wek. ‘I’m burning up my work. I don’t know what else to do with it,’ she apparently told her friend, Alida Klemantaski Monro, when asked to explain her choice of paper spills. Monro was unable to determine if Mew was sincere. It is impossible to know how many unpublished works or letters were among those incinerated by their author. In any case, the image of self-expurgation fits Mew’s somewhat eccentric persona. The same scene occurs in her unpublished short story ‘Elinor,’ when an enigmatic female author reduces her ‘heap of treasured papers’ to ‘masses of charred paper’ and ‘blackened fragments’ on the hearth. These apocryphal manuscripts are among the many frustrating lacunae in the biography and poetic legacy of Mew, one of the most inscrutable literary figures of the nineteenth century.