FREE CHOICE / ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN ENGLISH / C20TH / EUROPE / ENGLAND

Introduction

On a modest London street in Bloomsbury in 1913 called Devonshire Street stood a tiny independent bookshop by the name of The Poetry Bookshop. It’s proprietor was Harold Munro, and he ran this friendly neighbourhood store until 1926. The shop had a welcoming reputation and children used to run in to buy illustrated rhyme-sheets, alongside adults who were encouraged to browse and read inside the shop. Several well-known poets treated the Poetry Bookshop like their own homes; Wilfred Owen, Robert Frost and Ezra Pound were familiar faces. As well as selling books of poetry, Harold also published – and it’s thanks to him that Charlotte Mew, a sometimes shy-and-silent young woman from Bloomsbury, found her audience. Invited to the shop by Harold’s assistant Alida Klemantaski, while Mew had never sought fame, she was quickly caught up in the whirl of poetic activity – and agreed to the publication of The Farmer’s Bride in 1916.

In actual fact, The Farmer’s Bride was only a moderate success. Some critics were unmoved and readers were still more interested in war poetry or works of escapism. Charlotte Mew had the misfortune to come into her artistic powers at the end of the nineteenth and turn of the twentieth centuries, the so-called Georgian period when English poetry was notable for ever-more cliched and escapist visions of semi-mythical landscapes and romantic nostalgia. Nevertheless, Monro and Klemantaski felt that their faith in Mew was justified and they, along with a small but influential group of more modern-leaning writers, rallied around her. Luminaries such as Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy, Edith Sitwell and Robert Bridges were keen to champion her and, in America, famous critic Louis Untermeyer wrote:“Had Miss Mew printed nothing but [The Farmer’s Bride], it would have been sufficient to rank her among the most distinctive and intense of living poets.” Mew’s distinctive personal style also won her admirers: she was a very short lady who dressed in men’s black suits and carried a black umbrella everywhere she went. She may have been a lesbian; at the very least she was attracted to women. But a series of personal family disasters, including the deaths of her siblings, the increasing poverty into which her family plunged, and the institutionalising of her brother Henry and youngest sister Frieda into insane asylums, convinced her, whatever her sexual proclivities, never to marry lest she pass on the curse of mental illness to her own children.

Despite the patronage of a small circle of friends, during her lifetime (1869 – 1928) Mew amassed no large following and her reputation was eclipsed by the emergence of modern giants such as T.S. Eliot. However, history has been kinder to Mew. In the last few decades there has been a renewed interest in Mew’s prose and poetry and a re-evaluation of her contribution to literature. In 2021 a new biography of Charlotte Mew, This Rare Spirit by Julia Copus, was released and it seems that Charlotte Mew is belatedly having her moment in the spotlight. I hope that the poems you read on this course will introduce you to her distinctive voice and that you will enjoy reading poems by a person Virginia Woolf once called“the greatest living poet.”

• The Farmer’s Bride by Charlotte Mew

IB Learner Profile: caring

Lang and Lit Concept: perspective

Charlotte Mew writes from a different perspective on England than many of her late Victorian and Georgian contemporaries. While other poets of the time were celebrating the British Empire, and the ‘green and pleasant land’ of England’s hills and vales, Mew scrapes away at this image, uncovering a land of fear, poverty and even danger… especially for women, children, the elderly, sick, and mentally or socially vulnerable. Rather than idealising countryside, home, or marriage, Mew presents them as uneasy, disturbing institutions of control. Rural life is not protective but isolating; domesticity is oppressive. Institutions that promise order — the family, the church, the mental hospital — are redrawn as dark places of fear. In this England, suffering is the norm. Her words give us a unique perspective that’s unpredictable, clear-eyed… and unpopular with the reading public who preferred their poetry to be more cosy and comfortable than Mew writes for them.

• This Rare Spirit: the life of Charlotte Mew (Guardian review)

1. A Woman’s Place

“The Farmer’s Bride (1912) was nothing short of a punch to the gut and a slap to the ear”

Kathryn Hughes, writing about Mew in The Guardian

The opening poem of the collection is also the titular poem: The Farmer’s Bride describes the life of a young girl married to a much older man; she is clearly miserable in the relationship and tries to run away – only to be hunted down like an escaped animal and locked up in the farmer’s home. Narrated from the perspective of the farmer, it slowly becomes clear that the farmer thinks only of how his young wife might fulfil his own wants and needs. By the end of the poem, the reader has the uncomfortable suspicion that he might force himself on her – if he has not done so already.

The poem, like many others in The Farmer’s Bride, is rooted in late 19th and early 20th century assumptions about womanhood. Women were expected to be silent, patient, available for their husbands, emotionally compliant, and domestically useful. Rigid gender expectations held in English society of the time robbed women of autonomy and humanity and treated them as sexual objects or menial servants. The farmer’s bride’s husband narrates the poem, taking control of our viewpoint in much the same way he tries to control his wife. She is infantilised, animalised, and kept silent. Her fear, it is suggested, is unwarranted, even abnormal. The farmer does not attempt to understand his wife’s emotions, seeing her resistance to him only as a problem to be managed. Similarly, in The Quiet House, the house is quiet because women are silent, their wants and desires suppressed, their figures sublimated. Following the death of her mother and several siblings, and the leaving of other brothers and sisters, Mew finds herself alone in the house with her Father. To him, she exists only as somebody to control, the last reminder of his old life that he can’t bear to lose. Across her collection, Mew shows us that a woman is expected to be no trouble, unresistant to the wants of men, whether fathers, husbands, or those in wider society.

Learner Portfolio: Women in Charlotte Mew’s World

Charlotte Mew’s The Farmer’s Bride collection offers a haunting and often unsettling vision of what it meant to be a woman in late‑Victorian and early‑Georgian England. Across the poems female figures appear in many forms (as well as the bride and daughter you’ve already met, you’ll find spinsters, schoolgirls, strangers, widows, circus performers, the ill, the isolated, and more) yet their experiences often reveal striking commonalities of fear, confinement, expectation, and emotional suppression. In this Learner Portfolio task, explore these recurring patterns by skimming and scanning poems in The Farmer’s Bride collection to build a nuanced understanding of “the Mew woman.” Identify, organise, and present the shared experiences, pressures, and constraints placed upon women in Mew’s poetic world, and consider how these women navigate a society that consistently limits their autonomy and voice. Think about how you would like to present your findings: you could create a chart or mind-map, design a profile of a typical ‘Mew Woman’ or even write a mini-essay. Share your work and enter it into your Learner Portfolio

2. Life on the Margins

“I shall stay here: here you can se the sky; the houses in the streets are much too high…”

Whilst Charlotte Mew could be warm and affectionate with her friends (like Alida and Harold Munro), she did not enjoy her small fame and preferred to remain aloof from wider literary society. She was stung by critics who did not take well to her early published work (The Farmer’s Bride was moderately successful, but some critics were less than complimentary) and mistrusted people easily. Her short stature and refusal to play the part of a docile, submissive female (she walked unescorted about London, rolled her own cigarettes, and cut her hair short) often placed her at odds with ‘polite society’ which she felt was overly judgmental and restrictive for women. As time passed, she found herself increasingly alienated – a theme that resonates powerfully in The Farmer’s Bride collection.

Saturday Market describes a close-knit rural community who, on a weekend, descend to the local market to trade goods and socialise. The poem is narrated by somebody who seems to hang back on the edge of the market, not really getting too close or too involved. So she has an ideal vantage point when the crowd cruelly single out another woman to jeer and jostle. It’s not immediately clear why the people at the market have suddenly turned on her, but, as the poem follows her home, we see her dispose of a ‘red dead thing’ and wonder: what really happened? Similarly, Similarly, In Nunhead Cemetery follows a solitary figure who lingers among the graves, half‑observing the world of the living while feeling emotionally aligned with the dead. As she reflects on the person she has come to mourn, her thoughts drift between the present moment and vivid memories that seem to press in from the past. The poem hints at an earlier story of something unresolved or perhaps even unspoken that continues to trouble her. As she stands in this space between life and death we begin to wonder not only what happened to the person she grieves, but also what has happened to her, and why she feels unable to step fully back into the world beyond the cemetery gates.

Learner Portfolio: Practise for Paper 1 (Literature students only)

If you are a Language A: Literature student, at the end of your course you will sit Paper 1: Guided Literary Analysis. This paper contains two previously unseen literary passages. SL students write a guided analysis of one of these passages; HL students write about both passages. The passages could be taken from any of four literary forms: prose, poetry, drama or literary non-fiction. Each of the passages will be from a different literary form. Here are two poems by Charlotte Mew that you can use as passages to practice your textual analysis skills. Each passage is accompanied by a guiding question to provide a focus or ‘way in’ to your response. Choose one passage and complete this Learner Portfolio entry in the style of Paper 1: Guided Literary Analysis.

3. The Looming Asylum

“Interiors are often prisons in Mew’s poetry.”

Elizabeth Black

Mew lived in a time where attitudes to mental impairment were very different to those in many countries today. Throughout the nineteenth century, the British asylum system proliferated in response to a perceived ‘epidemic’ of madness. Clinical psychology was in its infancy, and genuine mental illnesses were conflated with nonsensical diagnoses of mania in response to things as diverse as grief, alcoholism, and even poverty! The new pseudo-science of eugenics taught that mental disabilities of all kinds were hereditary and that mothers were likely to pass mental disabilities onto their children. As two of her siblings suffered from mental illness, Charlotte and her sister Anne decided never to marry or bear children through fear of passing their family misfortune on to a new generation. Several poems in The Farmer’s Bride collection, either directly or indirectly, engage with Charlotte’s deep fear of her own mental fragility or the wider issues of mental health in a society that dealt with mental illness through institutionalisation and segregation. In The Changeling, a deeply disturbing poem, Charlotte presents a deeply disturbing critique of how children’s mental illness is handled by adults. The idea of a ‘changeling’ comes from folklore, a child believed to have been stolen by faeries and replaced with a something inhuman. Mew draws on this myth to expose issues of misunderstanding and adult neglect towards children who are different to the norm.

And Ken, a tender but disturbing poem, takes a scene between two vulnerable individuals as its central premise, investigating the processes of alienation that lead to the institutionalisation of people in mental asylums. An unnamed speaker witnesses the tension that grows between a mentally-impaired man (the poem’s titular Ken) and the other residents of a small town who are becoming increasingly intolerant of his behaviour. When Ken is eventually incarcerated the speaker is greatly affected. However, he or she does not speak out in Ken’s defence. The poem encourages us to reflect on the importance of empathy and compassion – but also on the limits of compassion in a society where people have to protect themselves against the resentment of others, lest they too fall victim to persecution.

Learner Portfolio: Mapping Charlotte Mew’s World

The more you read from The Farmer’s Bride collection, the stronger the sense grows that places matter in her poems. Her poems are located in common locations recognisable in towns and villages the length and breadth of the land. But, for Mew, places are more than just physical. Farmhouses, schools, roads, town squares, markets, circus tents, churches, asylum buildings – and more – are psychological spaces that control people’s behaviours, enforce society’s hidden power structures, and create fear. Some settings offer brief excitement or escape – but often this offer comes with a hidden cost.

For this Learner Portfolio task, think of a way to visualise Mew’s twisted realm. You could draw a map, create a mood board, or make a poster of the most important places from the collection. Annotate your design with notes explaining how places represent ideas, emotions, and psychological states rather than simply physical appearance. Ask about power dynamics, whether spaces are protective or dangerous… whether certain places offer freedom, or only the illusion of escape. Once you’ve finished your design, share your Gothic creation with the class, and add it to your Learner Portfolio. Better yet, create a display in your classroom that map’s Mew’s world, and all its implications.

4. A Taste of Freedom

“And then in Spring for three days came the Fair…”

The Fete is one of the collection’s most haunting monologues. Spoken by a schoolgirl in a French convent or boarding school, the poem blends childhood memories and repressed imagination with the experience of awakening to passion and desire. The poem recalls life in a slow, provincial town, bustling with eccentric characters like Celestin Lemaire and Madame Michel. But the speaker was carefully monitored. By day she would attend her classes, by night a watchman kept the girls closely supervised and under guard. Yet, when a circus rolls into town, the girls are permitted to attend… and the speaker remembers her first experience of a less fettered life, a glimpse of a wider world beyond the institution’s controls.

Learner Portfolio: Practise for Paper 2

Write this Learner Portfolio in the style of a practice Paper 2 response. You can use one of the prompts below, or another prompt given to you by your teacher. Although Paper 2 requires you to write about two literary works, for the sake of this exercise you could focus only on your response to Charlotte Mew’s poetry, or you could try to compare your ideas to another literary work you have studied (visit this post for more help with Paper 2 compare and contrast skills):

1. Discuss how the significance of the interactions between characters is shown in two works you have studied.
2. How, and to what extent, do the writers in two works you have studied portray the societies they are writing about?
3. Examine the portrayal of difference (e.g. physical limitations, mental illness, race, class or sexual identity) in literary works you have studied.
4. Animals and images drawn from the world of animals are a rich source of inspiration for writers. Discuss how animals are used to develop central ideas in at least two works you have studied.
   • Sample Answer (PDF)
   • Sample Answer (Annotated PPT)

Towards Assessment: Individual Oral

Supported by an extract from one non-literary text and one from a literary work (or two literary works if you are following the Literature-only course), students will offer a prepared response of 10 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of questions by the teacher, to the following prompt: Examine the ways in which the global issue of your choice is presented through the content and form of two of the texts that you have studied. (40 marks)

Charlotte Mew’s poems would make an excellent literary work to discuss in your oral assessment. The poems are rich in themes that could be used to generate a Global Issue: anxiety, alienation, the treatment of women, disability, war and remembrance, and more. Once you have finished studying the poems in this collection, spend a lesson working with the IB Fields of Inquiry: mind-map the poems, include your ideas for Global Issues, make connections with other Literary Works or Body of Works that you have studied on your course and see if you can make a proposal you might use to write your Individual Oral. Here are one or two suggestions to get you started, but consider your own programme of study before you make any firm decisions about your personal Global Issue. Whatever you choose, remember a Global Issue must have local relevance, wide impact and be trans-national:

Towards Assessment: Higher Level Essay

Students submit an essay on one non-literary text or a collection of non-literary texts by one same author, or a literary text or work studied during the course. The essay must be 1,200-1,500 words in length. (20 marks)††

While Charlotte Mew is a relatively under-appreciated poet, a small body of critical appreciation is available to those with an interest in her writing. You could add to her growing appreciation by finding a line of literary inquiry to investigate the poetic methods she employs so beautifully. Here are one or two examples of lines of inquiry suitable for this text – but remember to follow your own interests and the direction of your own class discussion to generate your own line of inquiry. It is not appropriate for students to submit responses to an essay question that has been assigned:

• How does Charlotte Mew use imagery to create tension between individuals and society throughout her selected poems?
• How does the range of voices crafted by Charlotte Mew convey the theme of ‘invisible suffering’ across the poems in her selected works?