Charlotte Mew’s Travel Poetics

Though Mew’s poetry brims with the French language, she is rarely discussed as a cosmopolitan or itinerant figure. Yet her occasional excursions across the Channel registered intensely, prompting Mew to reflect on the psycho-affective makeup of what she called her ‘queer uncertain mind.’ Following that introspective impulse, this chapter explores how Mew’s work engages with the defamiliarizing themes and genres of travel literature—what I refer to as her ‘travel poetics.’ Beginning with her clearest exemplar of the travel essay, ‘Notes in a Brittany Convent’ (1901), the chapter then probes the piece’s relationship to her short story, ‘In the Curé’s Garden’ (1902), before turning to three later poems: ‘The Fête’ (1914), ‘Le Sacré-Coeur’ (1921), and ‘Rooms’ (1929). It focuses on how foreign spaces afford multiple forms of identarian play, linking the well-established gender ambiguity of Mew’s speakers to their less noted multilingualism. In that performative range, we find an intimate connection between Mew’s travel poetics and her prowess in the dramatic monologue, for these texts model dramatic character as an unstable and place-based phenomenon. The chapter concludes by situating Mew’s project in the context of the rich nineteenth-century tradition of lyrical peregrination, asking what new connections we might chart between travel, multilingualism, and Isobel Armstrong’s foundational account of the Victorian ‘double poem.’