Knowledge of Charlotte Mew's life resembles her poetry--piercing detail emerging from a shadowed background. In Mew's life and work a phrase or an act flares out from an often puzzling obscurity. Her sixty published poems, however, clearly display her mastery of the correspondence between rhythm and feeling. Although often grouped with the Georgian poets, she stands singularly in her energy and ability to project through her oblique narratives and dramatic monologues an immediacy of anguish, isolation, and loss. What details are known of her life confirm her original poetry as a trustworthy record of her emotional response to experience.

Charlotte Mary Mew, the third of seven children, was born to Anna Maria Mardon Kendall Mew and Frederick Mew on 15 November 1869. At sixteen her father had left his home farm on the Isle of Wight for London and had been articled to an architect. His later associate in his...