Status Updates From Charlotte Mew

“She would always be physically attracted to women rather than to men, and she would always choose wrong. She was marked out to lose, with too much courage ever to accept it. From adolescence she was one of those whom Colette called ‘restless ghosts, unrecovered from wounds sustained in the past, when they crashed headlong or sidelong against the barrier reef, mysterious and incomprehensible, the human body’.”

“Childhood has no escape from the random impact of images, however little wanted. They come before the emotions which will give them significance, as though lying in wait." listen say what you will about Fitzgerald's cavalier interpreting of the signifiers, at least she is a WRITER and that's what makes a biographer

what i don't miss is brad's introduction. he has a fine mind but the writing is so ponderous and vaguely pleased with itself. still, this is right: "The reader who grows enchanted with her work will likely develop strong feelings about what a Charlotte Mew poem is, and a conviction that no one else could have written anything quite like it."

fitzgerald's scholarship has ofc come under question but i still value it not least for its chronological proximity, as well as other propinquities. it's not nothing to have known people who knew someone, cf. rereading alida monro's brief remembrance of mew, whom she met in 1915. wondering what florence hardy knew of her too, or eliot. if only i could somehow magically spirit myself to the buffalo special collection!