Charlotte Mary Mew made her contribution to short fiction with nine stories published between 1894 and 1914 and two published posthumously in the 1950s. Although her poetry is more often admired and studied today than her fiction, the stories reveal a strong voice and a distinctive perspective on life at the turn of the century. Mew's work was published in the Yellow Book and by Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop press; she was taken up by the energetic Mrs. "Sappho" Dawson Scott and befriended by the eminent Sydney Cockerell. At the turn of the century her works were enthusiastically admired by Thomas Hardy, May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon, and Ezra Pound.

Today, however, Mew holds a precarious place on the periphery of the literary canon. And that place is secured with her poetry, not her fiction, as the title of her obituary in the London Times (29 March 1928) bears witness: "Charlotte...