Charlotte Mew’s Silence

This chapter charts the role of silence in Charlotte Mew’s oeuvre, arguing that it offers an important means of understanding her theological and philosophical investments. Mew wrote to both articulate and overcome silence, in particular, what she saw as the empty words and entombing silence of the Christian faith. From the impossibility of speech in her short story ‘Passed,’ through to her bravura essay on Emily Brontë’s poetry and the anguished prayer of ‘Madeleine in Church,’ Mew rejects silence as a passive acquiescence to a deity or an embrace of death. Rather, she, like George Eliot, turns to ‘that roar which lies on the other side of silence,’ the vital hum of the natural world which offers true salvation.