With a selection of her poems
Shortly before her suicide at the age of fifty-nine, Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) brought out an expanded edition of her only book, The Farmer's Bride. It contained all the work she wished to preserve a mere twenty-eight poems, but among them some of the century's finest English lyrics. They had appeared, one by one, in the little magazines of the time, and found eminent admirers. Ezra Pound praised them, Virginia Wooll called Mew "very good and interesting and un-like anyone else, and Thomas Hardy thought her "far and away the best living woman poet-
Penelope Fitzgerald, the Booker Prize-winning author of Offshore and The Beginning of Spring, now gives us the life of this fascinating writer, whose uniquely moving-poems are, in Mew's own phrase, a cri de coeur. The bitterness of loss, the unrequited passion that so distinguish the poems, are Mew's own she survived the deaths of those she loved best, and was tortured by lesbian longings, a secret guilt she hid even from those who might understand. Her story is a tragic one, but in Fitzgeralds telling is also compellingly beautiful, a story of achievement against all odds, and a testimony to the redeeming powers of friendship
Soft cover

Condition: Like New