author
Charlotte Mary Mew
1869–1928
A striking English poet and short story writer, she stood between the Victorian age and literary modernism, writing with unusual intensity about loneliness, desire, grief, and the lives of women. Though never widely famous in her lifetime, her poems have endured for their emotional honesty and distinctive voice.
1 Audiobook
The farmer's bride
by Charlotte Mary Mew
About the author
Born in Bloomsbury, London, on November 15, 1869, she grew up in a family marked by repeated loss and mental illness, experiences that deeply shaped her imagination. She published short stories in literary magazines before becoming best known for poetry, and her work is often placed between late Victorian writing and early modernism.
Her first poetry collection, The Farmer’s Bride, appeared in 1916 and brought her serious critical attention. Readers and later critics have admired the way her poems combine plain speech, dramatic tension, and intense feeling, often returning to themes of isolation, forbidden love, spiritual unease, and the pressures placed on women.
In later years she struggled with poverty, ill health, and worsening mental distress. She died in London on March 24, 1928, but her reputation continued to grow after her death, and she is now remembered as one of the most original English poets of her era.