close to her heart, too. She was fond of underrated, idiosyncratic writers with distinctive voices, like the novelist J. L. Carr, or Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, or the remarkable and tragic poet Charlotte Mew. The publisher Virago’s enterprise of bringing neglected women writers back to life appealed to her, and under their imprint she championed the nineteenth-century novelist Margaret Oliphant. She enjoyed eccentrics like Stevie Smith. She liked writers, and people, who stood at an odd angle to the world. The child of an unusual, literary, middle-class English family, she inherited the Evangelical principles of her bishop grandfathers and the qualities of her Knox father and uncles: integrity, austerity, understatement, brilliance and a laconic, wry sense of humour.
She did not expect success, though she knew her own worth. Her writing career was not a usual one. She began publishing late in her life, around sixty, and in twenty years she published nine novels, three biographies and many essays and reviews. She changed publisher four times when she started publishing, before settling with Collins, and she never had an agent to look after her interests, though her publishers mostly became her friends and advocates. She was a dark horse, whose Booker Prize, with her third novel, was a surprise to everyone. But, by the end of her life, she had been shortlisted for it several times, had won a number of other British prizes, was a well-known figure on the literary scene, and became famous, at eighty, with the publication of The Blue Flower and its winning, in the United States, the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Yet she always had a quiet reputation. She was a novelist with a passionate following of careful readers, not a big name. She wrote compact, subtle novels. They are funny, but they are also dark. They are eloquent and clear, but also elusive and indirect. They leave a great deal unsaid. Whether she was drawing on the experiences of her own life – working for the BBC in the Blitz, helping to make a go of a small-town Suffolk bookshop, living on a leaky barge on the Thames in the 1960s, teaching children at a stage-school – or, in her last four great novels, going back in time and sometimes out of England to historical periods which she evoked with astonishing authenticity – she created whole worlds with striking economy. Her books inhabit a small space, but seem, magically, to reach out beyond it.
After her death at eighty-three, in 2000, there might have been a danger of this extraordinary voice fading away into silence and neglect. But she has been kept from oblivion by her executors and her admirers. The posthumous publication of her stories, essays and letters has now been followed by a biography (Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee, Chatto & Windus, 2013), and by these very welcome reissues of her work. The fine writers who have done introductions to these new editions show what a distinguished following she has. I hope that many new readers will now discover, and fall in love with, the work of one of the most spellbinding English novelists of the twentieth century.
Hermione Lee
2013
A true poet is first of all appreciated by his or her peer group. Critical recognition usually arrives afterwards. Charlotte Mew’s work was admired by writer contemporaries such as Siegfried Sassoon, Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf. Hardy said: ‘She is far and away the best living woman poet, who will be read when others are forgotten.’ Virginia Woolf said: ‘I think her very good and interesting and unlike anyone else.’
Mew’s words, coming powerfully alive on the page, also electrified audiences when she read her poems aloud. Penelope Fitzgerald, writing this biography, comments: ‘she seemed not so much to be acting or reciting as a medium’s body taken over by a distinct personality.’ Poetry in performance was relished in the early twentieth century as it is now, a hundred years later. The equivalent of our open mic poetry slam happened in the Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury, decorated with hand-coloured poetry posters, hung with curtains of sacking. People packed into the upstairs room and listened by candlelight. Between 1913 and 1920 you could attend readings by writers as diverse as Rupert Brooke, D. H. Lawrence, Edith Sitwell, Eleanor Farjeon, Anna Wickham and W. B. Yeats (among many others). Alida Monro did much of the work of the bookshop, alongside her poetry-publisher husband Harold. She often gave readings of the work of absent poets. She loved Mew’s poems, and in November 1915 invited Mew to come and hear her read them. Thus their long friendship began.
Mew, signalling her originality and difference through her words, also did so through her hoarse voice and her distinctive clothes. A tiny figure in a plain dark coat and skirt, severely cut, she sported a white shirt and black cravat, red stockings on occasion, and wore her hair cut short. She rolled her own cigarettes. She had an oval face, and huge eyes, which blaze out at us from her photographs.
Growing up in the aspirant London middle class, child of a struggling-architect father and snobbish mother, Charlotte was required to appear ladylike, decorative and genteel. However, her family’s financial misfortunes after her father’s death meant that she also needed to make a living. Like many another ambitious young woman before and after her, she decided to earn money by writing. She had an ailing mother to look after, housework to do, lodgers to tend, but she carved out a space in which to create short stories and poems. She travelled, too, in northern France, and explored new freedoms abroad, including trying out dancing the can-can, and hanging out with the sailors loafing along the quays. She fell passionately in love more than once, and endured the bitterness of sexual rejection. She made few but close friendships, with people who respected her shyness and contradictoriness.
These friends gave her the encouragement every writer needs to go on writing. The ruthless drive to create may be experienced as an internally produced one, but needs external validation too. This is probably even more true if you are breaking moulds, as Mew did. Coming after the Victorians and before the modernists, she invented a new music in poetry, a new kind of line, irregular and urgent, employing monologue forms, voices (often male) whose utterances seem to echo free-association, irregular rhythms that thump like the blood of a disturbed heart. The poems dramatise and rehearse themes of sexual longing and frustration, family crises, madness, creativity, childhood, cruelty. They are powerful, upsetting, whimsical, amoral.
A poet may become famous in his or her own day, then fade from sight when fame’s light swivels elsewhere. Time is conventionally supposed to tell whether someone’s work will last, to be admired afresh by future generations. In this view, history acts as a sort of sieve, reliably separating the wheat from the chaff. However, human agency is required alongside. If someone does not keep your name in the papers, your work in print, your books on the educational syllabus and in the literary canon, then your name may be temporarily forgotten, until you are rediscovered. Charlotte Mew, championed by distinguished male editors such as Harold Monro in her lifetime, was ignored by later ones, her poems left out of their anthologies; omissions which had the effect of falsifying and distorting the literary map. Nonetheless, Mew’s work went on being valued by successive waves of readers unafraid of appearing unfashionable. The scholar Val Warner produced a complete edition of her poems and prose in 1981. Then, in 1984, Penelope Fitzgerald published Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, which drew attention all over again to this remarkable writer. This reissue of that fine biography will, I hope, introduce a new generation to the fascinating, strange, vivid world of Mew’s poetic imagination.
Penelope Fitzgerald was writing fiction at the same time as working on her biography of Charlotte Mew, which allowed her to muse about how the two forms differed and overlapped. Her own biographer, Hermione Lee, quotes her joking: ‘On the whole I think biographers are madder than novelists.’ Fitzgerald also wrote: ‘I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.’ She considered that fiction’s advantage over biography was that it could contain dialogue, which of course the writer made up. As a biographer, she was diligent with her research, committed to facts and to truth. As a novelist writing biography, she occasionally allowed herself to speculate in a minor way. For example, speaking of the death in childhood of Charlotte’s younger brother, she says: ‘Charlotte, at seven years old, was certainly brought in, as elder sisters were in the 1870s, to see her little brother “in death”.’ She offers no direct evidence for this, simply invites us