Charlotte Mew: Poetics, Bodies, Ecologies

"This book emancipates Charlotte Mew from the silences of the past. With magisterial essays on the lyric, on poetic performance, on trans and queer studies, care and health, biography and so much more, it brings to our present the rhythms of her poetry, her meditations on the natural world, the performances of what she called her ‘queer uncertain mind’. Decadent, Modern, it shows a Mew that is new and of a world that is also us. This book inspires us to read Mew’s oeuvre and the work of the very fine essayists present in this book."

—Ana Parejo Vadillo, Reader in Victorian Literature and Culture, Birkbeck, University of London

This collection of essays explores the life and works of the British poet and author of short stories Charlotte Mew (1869-1928). It represents the first volume dedicated solely to critical engagement with the full range of Mew’s poetry, fiction and essays. Mew moved within a remarkable range of literary and intellectual circles, from The Yellow Book in the 1890s to Bloomsbury’s Poetry Bookshop in the 1910s. As such, her work challenges traditional distinctions between literary periods and sits within the more expansive framework of the long nineteenth century and its legacies. Each chapter contextualises Mew’s oeuvre by examining her experiments with poetic and narrative genres in relation to her wider late Victorian and early modernist intellectual milieu. The volume draws together literary scholars working across the fields of poetry and poetics, decadence, modernism, ecocriticism and queer theory, while illustrating the particular stylistic and thematic complexities of Mew’s writing.



Francesca Bratton is Kildare Arts Writer in Residence at the Department of English, Maynooth University, Ireland. She is author of Visionary Company: Hart Crane and Modernist Magazines (2022).

Megan Girdwood is Lecturer in English Literature, 1880–1940 at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She is author of Modernism and the Choreographic Imagination: Salome’s Dance after 1890 (2021).

Fraser Riddell is Assistant Professor in English and Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK. He is author of Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle (2022).