Coda: ‘I think it is myself I go to meet’—Charlotte Mew’s Afterlives

There is a great deal that we do not know about Charlotte Mew. The gaps in Mew’s biography present a fruitful challenge for her biographers, critics, and poets responding to her work. This final chapter delves into how biographers and writers have responded to these gaps, silences and omissions, in scholarly biographies (Copus), novelistic biographies (Fitzgerald), essays (Boland), poetry (Clampitt, Warner, Boland, Longley, McGuckian). This chapter considers how creative responses to Mew might provide alternative routes for thinking about the traces of queerness in lives that might ‘resist documentation’ (Micir). Ultimately, this chapter seeks to end the volume with a celebration of the questioning nature of Mew’s poetry, exploring how writers choose to create responses that respect Mew’s evasions and refusals.