Charlotte Mew and Her Friends

Penelope Fitzgerald's fascinating portrait of the tragic poet and her life at the heart of the Bloomsbury set.

Virginia Woolf hailed her as 'very good and interesting and unlike anyone else'; Charlotte Mew (1869--1928) was a poet with a formidable reputation, the writer of some of the best English poems of the twentieth century.

In her private life, to all appearances, Mew was a dutiful daughter living at home with her elderly mother. But this respectable façade hid painful truths -- the Mews were penniless, two siblings had been declared insane and Charlotte was secretly lesbian, living a life of self-inflicted frustration. Despite literary success and a passionate, enchanting personality, eventually the conflicts within her drove her to despair, and she killed herself by swallowing household disinfectant.

In this gripping portrait, Penelope Fitzgerald brings all her novelist's skills into play, giving us touching story,...