Charlotte Mew and the Lens of Photography

This chapter situates Charlotte Mew’s work in relation to the popular medium of photography, as it developed in the late Victorian period. As the chapter shows, Mew’s interest in visual technologies takes the tourist mode in ‘Notes in a Brittany Convent,’ while photographic metaphors and praxis inform many of her short stories, most notably the self-reflexive ‘Mark Stafford’s Wife,’ which forms the cornerstone of this chapter’s analysis of tableau photography. The experiments with photographic gaze and snapshot vision persist in poems like ‘Monsieur qui passe (Quai Voltaire)’ and ‘The Fête.’ Mew’s poetry further evidences her understanding of the performativity of portrait photography, often entering into dialogue with specific paintings, including Titian’s Noli Me Tangere and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee.