J.S.A. Lowe’s Reviews > Charlotte Mew > Status Update

“Childhood has no escape from the random impact of images, however little wanted. They come before the emotions which will give them significance, as though lying in wait." listen say what you will about Fitzgerald's cavalier interpreting of the signifiers, at least she is a WRITER and that's what makes a biographer

what i don't miss is brad's introduction. he has a fine mind but the writing is so ponderous and vaguely pleased with itself. still, this is right: "The reader who grows enchanted with her work will likely develop strong feelings about what a Charlotte Mew poem is, and a conviction that no one else could have written anything quite like it."

fitzgerald's scholarship has ofc come under question but i still value it not least for its chronological proximity, as well as other propinquities. it's not nothing to have known people who knew someone, cf. rereading alida monro's brief remembrance of mew, whom she met in 1915. wondering what florence hardy knew of her too, or eliot. if only i could somehow magically spirit myself to the buffalo special collection!

"Charlotte once saw a woman walking across Cumberland Market, in Camden Town, 'with a tiny child holding on to her skirt, trying to keep up with her and chattering in a rather tired treble, like a chirpy little sparrow, as they went along. Suddenly the woman stopped and struck the child, with a thickly spoken "Now go and make yer bloody 'appy life miserable and stop yer bloody jaw."' This too was a cri de coeur."

"If she did not want to bear children, she would have liked to want to. 'If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the child who went or never came.'"