In Conversation with Julia Copus
Julia Copus has published four poetry collections. She also edited Charlotte Mew: Selected Poetry and Prose, and this year her biography of Mew’s life, This Rare Spirit, is published by Faber. Zannah Kearns spoke to her over Zoom to find out about the experience of researching such a singular poet.
This Rare Spirit has been out in the world for a while now, is it very different to having a poetry collection out?
I think it is, in that the audience is slightly different—and hopefully a bit wider. I imagine this book will hold a special interest for poets (it takes a close look at the links between the poems and the life) but I hope it will also appeal to people interested more generally in London around the turn of the century, or those interested in writers’ lives in general. So yes, there’s a slightly different audience, and that feels new. The poetry world is made up to some extent of fellow poets, poetry students and so on—which means that as a poet you know some of your readership personally; but since the Mew biography came out, I’ve had messages from other types of readers, including more general non-fiction readers and some academics too, and it’s been lovely to have that new kind of contact.
Indeed, you were asked recently to participate in an academic symposium on Charlotte Mew.
I was. They seemed particularly interested in what I had to say about Mew’s life and work from the point of view of a poet and fellow practitioner. Penelope Fitzgerald wrote a biography called Charlotte Mew and Her Friends back in 1984, but parts of it were fairly strongly fictionalised. I think she had her own ideas about who Charlotte Mew was—her own version of her—and some of the facts of Mew’s life were slightly modified to fit with those ideas. In a way that played to my advantage because I was able to share quite a lot of new biographical information at the symposium.
Can you tell us more about some of the information you discovered?
Quite a bit of new material came to light during my research—including, for instance, the medical records of Charlotte’s older brother, Henry, who was hospitalised for much of his life. Charlotte’s sister, Freda, was also institutionalized. The distress of witnessing mental illness close at hand, and of seeing her siblings incarcerated, affected her deeply, and unsurprisingly, society’s treatment of the mentally ill is a recurrent motif in Mew’s poetry.
I should say, though, that there is always the danger of reading too much biography into a writer’s work, and Mew’s poems aren’t intended to be read as straightforward accounts of events in her life. On the other hand, an understanding of her life and character does of course shed light on her themes, and on the way in which she handles those themes. We know that Mew read other writers in this way—that she inferred certain connections between the life and work.
You mean her essay on Emily Brontë?
Yes. I talk about this in my introduction to This Rare Spirit. Mew makes quite a few revealing comments in that essay on Brontë. At one point in the essay, she goes so far as to say that ‘the true—the one original likeness—Emily herself has sketched: it is outlined in these slim pages of neglected verse . . .’ That’s quite a claim—that the only true, original likeness of Emily Brontë is outlined in her poems! It does suggest that Mew perhaps expected her readers to draw conclusions about her own character and life from reading her poetry.
Yes, it’s so interesting how she switches genders, and does other things to conceal herself, which maybe gave her the freedom to really look straight-on at the subject she wants to write about.
I think there’s a lot of truth in that. There’s a good example in ‘The Quiet House’, where the genders of the real-life counterparts of characters in the poem appear to have been switched: the mother becomes the father, for instance (if we read that poem partially biographically). And I think that may well have given Charlotte the emotional distance she needed to write about her family. It also provided a kind of disguise—a way of protecting the identity of real-life family members. She was very protective of her family.
While writing this biography, you also wrote and published your fourth poetry collection, Girlhood (Faber, 2019), which won the inaugural Derek Walcott Poetry Prize. Do you feel that Charlotte inspired or influenced its writing? For example, with your final sequence ‘MARGUERITE’, I wondered if you’d come across that case study when reading about mental illness during the Victorian era?
I can’t quite remember the order of things, but I was certainly very interested in the broader idea of the silencing of women around that time—and still am. The specific story that inspired my ‘Marguerite’ sequence came from a wonderful book called Mad, Bad and Sad by Lisa Appignanesi (Virago, 2009)—a history of women and their mind doctors through the ages. What fascinated me about the dynamic between Marguerite and her mind doctor, Jacques Lacan, was the way in which she turned silence to her advantage for a while, refusing to give up all her secrets. Lacan was clearly less interested in helping her than in bullying her into submission so that he could write about her. And in fact her case study became the focus of the doctoral thesis that made him famous. That seems to me morally questionable, to say the least.
In Mew’s work, the most obvious example of the silenced woman is the character at the heart of her poem ‘The Farmer’s Bride’. The bride remains conspicuously silent throughout the whole poem—we never once hear her speak—and towards the end, we discover she has been locked away in an attic room. It’s is an extraordinary portrayal of a mismatched marriage, but it’s the farmer who gets to speak about his distress; not his bride. In one sense, that reflects what was going on in society at the time: most of the time, it was men’s voices that were heard in public.
Much Victorian poetry about marriage is rarely happy, is it? And they were trying to change the rights of married women who lost all their property . . .
They were, yes. When Mew wrote her ‘Farmer’s Bride’ poem, a government committee on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes was debating the legal issues surrounding divorce, with a view to bringing the rights of married women more in-line with those of men. The discussion was just coming to a head in 1912 when ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ was published in magazine form.
And coming back to this idea of the silenced woman, Mew also wrote a horrifying short story called ‘A White Night’, in which a woman is buried alive by a group of men. So it’s something that crops up more than once in her work. It’s possible that reading about these women in Mew fed into some of the poems in Girlhood—in the Marguerite sequence and elsewhere. There are silenced women and bullying male characters in other poems.
Yes, the ‘Gaffer’ poem . . . I come back to that a lot because I can just picture these giggly girls, and the way the door sort of sucks back the air as the Gaffer wrenches it open.
That poem is called ‘Acts of Anger’, and it occurs to me that that moment with the door is quite Mew-like in a sense, in that it depicts a sudden release of repressed anger that’s been quietly building throughout the poem. Out of nowhere, the Gaffer is suddenly there in the doorway, wrenching the door open—almost off its hinges—to get at the girls. It’s not unlike the cri de coeur that occurs at the end of ‘The Farmer’s Bride’, when the farmer’s frustrated longing comes pouring out of him. The last stanza of the Mew poem is really quite terrifying:
She sleeps up in the attic there
Alone, poor maid. ’Tis but a stair
Betwixt us. Oh! my God! the down,
The soft young down of her, the brown,
The brown of her – her eyes, her hair, her hair!
It’s as if the farmer’s on the verge of tearing up those stairs and claiming what he desires.
One thing that interested me about this last stanza of ‘The Farmer’s Bride’, is that in her introduction to Modern Women Poets (Bloodaxe, 2005) where you first encountered Mew (and also appeared as a featured poet yourself), Deryn Rees-Jones writes that the ‘down’ referred to is arm hair. And I wondered how she could be so specific?
Ah, that’s interesting because that passage in Mew reminds me of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, which is about another (more quietly) sexually frustrated man, who’s just let life pass him by. In the poem, he talks about all these women who have come and gone through his life, and at one point he describes their arms in the lamplight. I wonder if that’s what Deryn had in mind because he does use the word ‘downed’:
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(And in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Those bits of Mew and Eliot have always reminded me of each other.
Interesting. So did his come after hers? Because he's writing at a very similar time, isn’t he?
I did look into this, in fact—into which of the two poems was written earlier—but it’s hard to unravel. Mew’s poem was first published in The Nation in 1912, while Eliot’s Prufrock didn’t appear in print (in Poetry magazine) until 1915. That order of events hints at the possibility that the Eliot lines might have been influenced by Mew’s. But delving deeper, it turns out that in fact Eliot was working on Prufrock as early as 1910. As I say, it’s complicated! And, of course, there’s the possibility that they were both influenced by a third source. They both read the French symbolist poets, for instance . . .
You can see the way their minds are going. And this is one of the things so interesting with her poetry: we sort of think of Victorian sensibilities and think it’s going to be safe and ‘nice’. But with Mew’s every subject—it’s not like she’s trying to be provocative for the sake of it, but she’s just fiercely truthful.
Yes, I think that’s exactly right. Mew was trying to lift the cover on some of the deceptions of her time: Victorian society was not safe and nice—very far from it. There were a huge number of sexual misconduct scandals back then, for instance. I was reading a piece on The Conversation website recently that looked at the parallels between Jeffery Epstein’s sordid sex ring and a scandal that was being written about in 1885 in the Pall Mall Gazette, about underage girls being sold for sex. So I think what Mew was doing was saying ‘Yes, all right, we can lock our mentally ill people away, we can fail to convict rapists, we can pretend that Society is all very nice and safe—but this is the reality.’ She was one of the first poets—if not the first—to write about the double standards of the time in such an honest and damning way. And I think the fact she was a female poet speaking out in that way shows extraordinary courage.
Going back to her interest in Emily Brontë—do you think that helped her have the courage to write in this way?
Precedents are always helpful, and I think Mew identifies with Emily Brontë very strongly. She talks approvingly about Emily’s ‘savage heart’ and ‘her resentful mood’. Perhaps Brontë’s candour fed into her own courage—gave her licence to express the sort of things a woman of her class was not supposed to know about, still less to talk about in print.
But there was an awareness—a lot of charitable work among prostitutes, and a lot of medical care was undertaken within homes, so the reality of death and illness was perhaps starker in some ways?
Well, it’s true that women of Mew’s class—which is to say the middle class—did a fair amount of philanthropic work with disadvantaged groups but, crucially, the work they did was carried out at a remove: there was a clear barrier between the philanthropists and the people they were trying to help. It was almost as if they viewed the people they were caring for as a separate species. Mew played with this idea in a short story called ‘Passed’, in which the middle-class female narrator encounters a distressed young woman who is clearly in need of help and who turns out to be a prostitute. And as the story goes on, the protagonist gets really involved with this woman—I mean emotionally involved. She follows the prostitute back to her house and ends up holding her in her arms. That sort of close physical contact between the classes would definitely have been frowned upon. Mew was interested (at least in her writing) in battering down those divides.
There’s also a poem, ‘On the Asylum Road’, which describes a hospital very similar in appearance to the institution where Charlotte’s sister, Freda, ended up. Mew writes in the third stanza: ‘None but ourselves in our long gallery we meet . . .’ She’s basically saying there that there’s no real divide between the sane and insane, the haves and have-nots. We’re essentially the same: any one of us might find ourselves in desperate circumstances, and the change could happen in the blink of an eye.
Which she knew; she'd seen it happen with her siblings.
Yes. She’d seen them cross this so-called divide, from sane to insane. And the family also went from being very comfortably off to fairly impoverished.
It’s such a sad story because there's so much vibrancy to Charlotte Mew; she was so fun, going away on all these trips with her friends. She was clearly outrageous, and then she gets ground down by her siblings’ suffering and their poverty. I went to a Zoom seminar in which you said she didn't know how to say ‘yes’ to opportunities?
That’s my own take on it, yes. I think she didn’t always know how to say yes. What I mean is, she wasn’t very good at accepting help from the likes of Lady Ottoline Morrell, for instance. Morrell was a famous benefactor who befriended several of the leading writers of the day: Siegfried Sassoon, T. S. Eliot, Yeats, Virginia Woolf . . . She could have done a lot for Charlotte’s reputation—could have introduced her to a lot of so-called ‘important’ people—but Charlotte didn’t seem to want that; I think she wanted the poems to speak for themselves. And on top of that she was very nervous of personal fame: she wanted fame for her poems, but not for herself.
Yes, she wrote a poem, didn't she, about fame?
Called ‘Fame’, yes! The speaker in that poem talks about wanting to go back to ‘the sweet briar air’ of her former life, in which she was anonymous. Mew wasn't interested in being a celebrity but she definitely wanted her poems to be out there. Many writers will relate to that, I’m sure.
And when she was given a state pension, based on her past work, she absolutely froze, didn't she? She felt an expectation and so couldn’t write anything.
It was a Civil List pension, in fact—so quite an honour. She was very grateful for it but she believed being granted this honour made her poetry writing so much more visible, and she just wasn’t comfortable with it. Accolades and prizes do that, to a degree; they shine a spotlight on you, and perhaps they do set up a certain expectation.
In the biography, you show how she spent years and years working away in the British Library. And in a letter, critiquing her friend’s poetry, she demonstrates a phenomenal level of knowledge and skill . . .
It was in the famous Reading Room at the British Museum, in fact; she did a lot of work there over the years. I think the letter you’re referring to was written to her friend Edith Hill, who had sent Mew one of her own poems for comment. It’s interesting because Mew often pretended not to know much about poetry (shortly before writing the Edith Hill letter, she’d told another friend ‘I read next to no poetry, and understand less’) but she was very assured technically and had firm views about poetry and how it should be written. In the letter you mention, she gave her friend some very thorough feedback—on metre, rhyme, the personal versus the universal . . . Possibly the feedback was more thorough than Edith had wanted!
So, why do you think she wrote so little? Do you think she wrote work that she destroyed? But also, there was that brilliant quote when she says ‘if poems were like puddings I’d make one every week’. So she couldn’t just churn them out, which seems obvious considering how some of her poems are so monumental—The Farmer’s Bride and also The Trees are Down. Of course, you can’t churn those out . . .
Well one thing, she wasn’t that young when she started writing poems. She started off as a short story writer, but it’s fair to say that her real talent was as a poet, and she was forty-six by the time her first poetry collection, ‘The Farmer’s Bride’, came out in print. By then she only had another twelve years to live.
My own view is that it’s unlikely she wrote a whole lot more than she published. Her friend, Sydney Cockerell, suggested otherwise in his Times obituary: he said he thought what we have is about a tenth of what Mew actually wrote: ‘less than a tithe’, he said. But he wasn’t basing that assertion on anything he knew. I think he wasn't really aware (from his rather comfortable, wealthy position) of just what a struggle daily life was for Charlotte. After her father died, when she was twenty-eight, she became head of the family. Her brother, Henry, was in the asylum by then, so it was Charlotte who had to look after the whole household.
And her mother sort of abdicated . . .
She passed on the responsibility to Charlotte, yes. I think in fact it wasn’t so unusual at the time for middle-class widows to rely on their children in this way. But still, it seems very unfair—a huge burden for Charlotte to carry.
And, do you think she ever got any feedback on her poems? Sydney gave her some feedback but she replied with a ‘yeah thanks, but I know what I’m doing.’ It doesn’t seem as if she received any editorial advice from friends?
To my knowledge, she never asked for feedback.
Her poems weren’t workshopped then . . .
No! She did send poems and stories to friends but not, so far as I know, for comment. I wrote my own first two books of poetry without showing poems to anyone, so I don’t find that so strange (although these days I do belong to a workshopping group, here in the southwest and I find it incredibly helpful). I think many other poets in Mew’s day did swap and share their work. Perhaps it’s another way in which she might be viewed as an outsider; she kept herself very much on the fringes of the literary world.
Meanwhile, Bloomsbury is happening right beside her.
The Bloomsbury group was right on her doorstep, yes. For three years, she lived just round the corner from Virginia Stephen (later Woolf) and her siblings, but never became part of their set.
Going back to the question of feedback, I should perhaps add that although Mew didn’t send her poems round herself, some of her friends took it upon themselves to do so. Sydney Cockerell sent the poems round to several of his (male) friends – who didn’t hesitate to send back comments. One of these friends complained about the fact that Mew sometimes wrote in the voice of a man: ‘a woman ought always to write like a woman,’ he said. And Sydney, in turn, sent these messages on to Charlotte, who hadn’t asked for them in the first place! Interestingly, though, she did keep them—she didn't screw them up and throw them away—although in the end I don't think she took an awful lot of notice of them; they certainly didn’t alter the way she wrote. She also sent poems to friends if they expressly asked to see them—as was the case with Catherine Dawson Scott and May Sinclair. And they also saw fit to offer comments.
And sometimes had to backtrack on their responses . . .
Yes. For instance, May Sinclair complained about the unevenness of the rhythm in one particular poem. In response, Charlotte told May, ‘Of course I could write smoothly if I chose to’—and indeed she could! She wrote a number of sonnets in a very even, regular iambic pentameter. So yes, this is yet more evidence that she was actually very confident about her writing; she knew exactly what she was doing.
She clearly inspires loyalty, because it could have got a bit tiresome being friends with a prickly person. She sometimes received letters from people having to reassure her. But she’d also had such good friendships, maintained throughout her life from her school days.
I think she had two different kinds of friendship: there were the friends she’d made at school and kept for life, friends with whom she could be her ‘real self’—by which I mean naturally at ease and unguarded. Ethel Oliver was probably her oldest and closest friend, and she described Charlotte as ‘oh, so charming’ and I really don’t think Ethel thought of her as prickly at all. But I think Charlotte-Mew-the-poet was less sure of how to conduct herself in her literary friendships; she never seemed completely at ease around many of the people she met later on in life through her writing. I think the brusqueness they sometimes detected in her was probably a defence mechanism; a way of coping. I also suspect she wanted to keep some of these people at arm’s length.
Her older friends include the Chick family, don’t they? They would have been aware of her siblings because they would have known them when they were mentally well and at home. So she didn’t have to guard that story from them?
I think that’s right, yes. And the same is true of Ethel and Winifred Oliver and a handful of others. They would all have known about Henry and Freda from an early age: they knew about their illnesses and, as you say, they had known them before they became ill. Charlotte kept Henry and Freda’s existence a secret from the friends she made in later life, and that meant she could never be entirely open with them—which again explains her occasional abruptness perhaps. You mention the Chicks, specifically: Charlotte stayed in touch with them all her life. The Chick girls were all very clever academically—the youngest became one of the first female surgeons, for instance—though for generations the family trade had been lace-making.
Talking of which, you have some of Charlotte Mew’s needlework, don’t you? I’m not sure every biographer ends up with such incredible artefacts. Descendants of her friends have given you mementoes of her life.
Yes, people have been very generous and I have been very lucky. I think they could see that my passion for Mew and her work runs deep. And there are things about Charlotte Mew that I relate to on a personal level. Like many other people, I’m sure, there are times when I feel like an outsider. As someone who is white and (I suppose) now middle-class, that might sound like a strange thing for me to say, and especially in these times, but there are many ways of being an outsider. And I relate, too, to Mew’s ambivalent attitude towards fame: that pull that she describes so well between wanting recognition for the work and wishing to remain behind the scenes as a ‘personality’.
At the minute there’s a bit of a cult of personality, even in poetry. It’s sometimes accused of being too much about how marketable a person is . . .
I hate all that side of things, and I think Mew would have been very uncomfortable with it too. And yet, were she around today, hers would probably be just the type of image that people would be drawn to. I suspect she would be very voguish as a personality right now—very marketable, to use your word. Perhaps she would have appreciated the irony.
That prompts me to ask about the queerness in her writing, which contrasts with the lack of evidence in her life as to her sexual identity. I suppose that’s a bit like Emily Brontë, in that a person can write queerly without it necessarily being a direct indicator as to what we can deduce about them as an individual?
The thing about Charlotte Mew is that she wrote in the voices of both men and women. And sometimes when she wrote in the voices of women she was writing about romantic or physical encounters with men. It doesn’t make sense for one of these modes of writing to be taken as evidence of sexual orientation and not the other. It’s possible she was bisexual, but the whole question of her sexuality—of trying to pinpoint and label it—seems to me to be a bit of a fruitless path to pursue.
That’s not to say that her work can’t be read through the lens of queer studies—or indeed through the lenses of other literary theories. I understand the importance of her work to the discipline of queer studies in particular. So much of Mew’s writing is about doing away with the sham borders that society constructs between people who are perceived as different in some way. It even questions the boundaries we put up between human and non-human: you only have to read ‘The Trees Are Down’ to understand how closely Mew identified with the non-human elements of the natural world. Time and again in her poems she imagines her way into the heart of another life and gives it voice—whether that life be male or female, sane or insane, rich or poor, respectable or scandalous, human or non-human. Her writing asks us to question the purpose of partitioning off one mode of existence from another.
But I do think trying to pin down Charlotte Mew’s own sexual preferences is a bit of a fruitless exercise, as I say. It was for me anyway, and I looked quite hard. I would have been delighted to discover a romantic or sexual partner—male or female—and to know that Charlotte had fulfilment of that kind, but there just isn’t any evidence.
She had this amazing relationship with her sister, so perhaps she had sufficient emotional fulfilment? And they worried about passing on mental illness to offspring . . . which could be seen to suggest her inclination, the fact that she'd even considered children and marriage?
Yes, I think her sister Anne did become her ‘significant other’ in many ways. As to the question of children, it’s difficult to say—and even if she definitely wanted them, I don’t think that sheds any clear light on her sexual orientation. In ‘Madeleine in Church’, her longest poem, she says ‘if there were fifty heavens, God could never give us back the child who went or never came.’ That certainly sounds like a heartfelt cri de coeur but so does the farmer’s outburst at the end of ‘The Farmer’s Bride’. I think it would be too much to conclude from those lines that Charlotte longed to be a mother herself. In the end, it goes back to the question we were discussing earlier, about how much of the writer and the writer’s life can be inferred from the writing . . .
And do you have a favourite poem of hers?
That’s a very difficult question! We’ve talked about ‘The Farmer’s Bride’, which I think is astonishing, not least because the reader ends up sympathizing with the farmer as well as with his terrified bride. It never loses its freshness for me. And then there’s ‘The Trees are Down’—another extraordinary poem. I carry both these poems around in my head. Listen to these lines from ‘The Trees are Down’—they’re from right near the end, after the trees have been felled and are lying in the grass:
There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;
They must have heard the sparrows flying,
And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying –
There’s also a little jewel of a poem called ‘Sea Love’, which I know by heart and often think of. It’s just eight lines, but it’s magical, and part of that magic has to do with the music of the words and part of it with the physical setting, a moonlit shoreline that I visit often. But I could mention so many more. There are parts of many of the poems that really stick with me; they’ve almost become a part of how I see the world, in that strange way that poems can do.
And what is it like now? After having worked so intensively on her whole life for seven years, she was right beside you . . .
She’s very much still with me at the moment, especially as the paperback edition has just been published. But rather than pursuing her—digging into dark corners and trying to glean as much as I can about her life—I now feel like I’m acting as a kind of ambassador. My work on Mew’s behalf continues! One of her contemporary reviewers thought she had supernatural powers: he credited her with ‘an eerie ability to get beneath the skin of her broken men and women’—and she will continue to haunt me, I’m sure.
Julia Copus is a UK-based poet and biographer. Her book This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew was published last year by Faber & Faber.
Zannah Kearns is a freelance writer and editor and works in the charity sector. She co-hosts the Poets’ Cafe reading series in Reading.