THIS RARE SPIRIT: A Life of Charlotte Mew

Hugely admired in the early 20th century, the poet Charlotte Mew had a tragic life that ended in her suicide in 1928. But during the years when she was publishing poetry she was given the highest praise by Virginia Woolf and literary luminaries such as Thomas Hardy and Siegfried Sassoon. Mew's early life in Bloomsbury was devastated when her brother Henry, who suffered delusions, was incarcerated in Bethlem mental hospital. She was divided between three worlds: the desperate sadness of home life, the rich opportunities of the world of words, and the emotional reassurance found in the homes of literary acquaintances where she would later almost certainly fall in love with several women friends, though no love letters of hers survive. This fascinating biography shows how these worlds were intertwined in the life of a tiny woman with a massive talent. In the late 19th century women's emancipation was well under way, with Ibsen's Doll's House symbolising the restrictions that Bloomsbury women were keen to escape. Charlotte lived the intellectual life to the full, attending lectures and visiting the British Museum's Reading Room, meeting Aubrey Beardsley and his circle and starting a lifelong smoking habit. On the death of her father, Charlotte became head of the household, eventually nursing her sister Anne in her last illness and coping with the increasingly melancholiac Freda, who, like Henry, was committed to an asylum. Meanwhile Charlotte was writing and publishing in periodicals including Beardsley's Yellow Book, mainly poetry but also short stories. In a Southall literary circle she met the mystic Evelyn Underhill and the writer May Sinclair, who may have repulsed her sexual advances. Charlotte's collected verse, The Farmer's Bride, was well thought of by Sydney Cockerell, Walter de la Mare and John Masefield, while Siegfried Sassoon introduced her to the glamorous literary set surrounding Lady Ottoline Morrell. But the death of Charlotte's sister Anne precipitated her into a spiral of suicidal depression. 464pp, colour photos.