Charlotte Mew’s Self-Effacing Celebrity

In both her own time and our own, Charlotte Mew is consistently portrayed as a diffident, self-effacing figure. In contrast to other iconic women poets of the early twentieth century, such as Edith Sitwell and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mew apparently refused to use her image to promote her work, just as she routinely declined to provide personal details for anthologists. This chapter challenges such a narrative, revealing that Mew was in fact more visible than we have previously assumed and that her engagements with publicity and celebrity are cannier than scholars have acknowledged. To support this, it focuses on two interlinked aspects of her public visibility: portrait photographs (circulated in periodicals such as The Bookman and The Sphere) and accounts of her public readings. It attends to Mew’s distinctive self-fashioning—a persona constructed from dress, bearing, mannerisms, and speech—considering how this intersects with her remarkable poetic voice, concluding with a close reading of ‘Fame,’ a poem that encodes Mew’s ambivalent response to public exposure.