Loss and Silence: Mew and Jennings

Charlotte Mew and Elizabeth Jennings are among the most underrated English poets of the twentieth century. Both write about love in its diminished states — love that cannot be spoken, love that has dwindled into habit, love that exists in the gap between what is felt and what can be expressed. Their poems are studies in emotional restraint, and they reward the kind of patient, attentive close reading that A-Level examiners value most highly.

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Charlotte Mew: "A quoi bon dire"

Context (AO3)

Charlotte Mew (1869–1928) lived a life marked by repression, loss, and mental illness. Two of her siblings were committed to asylums, and Mew and her sister Anne made a pact never to marry for fear of passing on hereditary mental instability. Mew was almost certainly lesbian, living at a time when female homosexuality was socially invisible — not even acknowledged as a possibility by most of her contemporaries. Unlike male homosexuality, which was criminalised under the 1885 Labouchere Amendment, female same-sex desire simply did not exist in the legal or cultural imagination.