SUZANNE RAITT

Charlotte Mew a n d May Sinclair:

A love-song

‘Are all geniuses perverts?’ wrote Catherine Dawson Scott in her diary in
July 1914.1 ’Charlotte is evidently a pervert’, she went on. There were
those, Catherine Dawson Scott among them, who also beIieved she was a
genius. Thomas Hardy called her ‘far and away the best living woman
poet, who will be read when others are forgotten’;2H.D. wrote that, ‘alone
of our generation’, Mew had ‘succeeded’ in writing ’dramatic lyric^';^ and
Virginia Woolf said she was ‘very good and interesting and unlike anyone
The two, Woolf and Mew, confronted each other across the sick-bed
of Florence Hardy (Thomas Hardy’s wife) in October 1924.5 To what end
will never be known; but seeing Mew seems to have provoked Woolf into
musing on her relationships with other women writers. In the same diary
entry as the one in which she describes seeing Mew, ‘the thought of
Katherine Mansfield comes to [her]’, ’that strange ghost, with the eyes far
apart, & the drawn mouth, dragging herself across the room . . . poor
woman, whom in my own way I suppose I loved.’6
Woolf’s own sexual experience was opening out during that year of 1924
with the development of her intimacy with Vita Sackville-West. She was
predisposed to be reminded of women she had loved. But something in
Mew’s tiny figure, and in the defiant toss of her head, may have recalled
her affection for, and ambivalent jealousy of, the sexually ambiguous
Katherine Mansfield. There is no record anywhere that Woolf was aware of
Charlotte Mew‘s suicide in 1928 at the age of 59. But thirteen years later, in
1941, she herself, at the same age, would do the same thing.
Charlotte Mew is little known today. Born in 1869, she lived for most of
her life with her mother and sister Anne in Gordon Square, where she
must have been, for a time, Virginia Woolf’s neighbour. She eked out a
living writing poems and stories, supplemented by her mother’s annuity
(Anna Maria Mew died in 1923), and by Anne’s meagre earnings as a re-
storer of antique furniture. Charlotte published stories in the Yellow Book,
the Egoist, Temple Bar, and others; and the Poetry Bookshop under Harold
Monro published a collection of her poems, The Farmer’s Bride, in 1916. It
was reissued with eleven additional poems in 1921, and The Rumbling Sailor
was published posthumously in 1929. Recently Val Warner has edited her
Collected Poems and Prose for Virago Press.7
4 Critical Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3

In the early spring of 1913 Catherine Dawson Scott had introduced Mew
to May Sinclair in the hope that Sinclair would take Mew up, as she had a
habit of doing, and promote her as a writer and poet. May Sinclair was by
this stage a wealthy and well-known novelist, who had close links with
most of London’s literary community. Sinclair gave Mew a copy of her
latest novel, The Combined Maze, whose action centres around the sexuality
of Violet Usher, a woman ’like some beautiful flower rising superbly from
two ugly, livid, and distorted roots’.8 The Combined Maze is obsessed with
the body in all its ‘insane perver~ities’,~
and it seems probable that Charlotte
Mew‘s interest was aroused partly by the close relationship between Violet
and her friend Winny. Neither Sinclair nor Mew ever married or openly
took a lover; both were extremely shy, even fastidious; and both shrank
from intimate exchanges. But for a brief period they seem to have been
drawn into an ambivalent and intense relationship with one another. In
spite of the fact that Sinclair destroyed all Mew‘s letters, it is Mew’s voice
that echoes through the texts that have come down to us, as Sinclair reacts
tensely to the urgency of Mew’s demands. In 1913, soon after they met,
Sinclair was already seeking defensively to assuage Mew‘s paranoia: ‘as
for “Good-bye” I never dreamt it would be interpreted ”Good-bye for
Ever!”’l0 In March 1914 Mew responded to Sinclair’s casual enquiry about
vacant rooms in Bloomsbury by spending several days flat-hunting on her
behalf. Sinclair was shocked:
How perfectly angelic of you to go & take all that awful bother . . . I never
dreamed of even hinting that you shd. run around, I only thought that
perhaps you might hear of something & let me know . . . And all my days
I shall be haunted by a vision of you, small, & too fragile by far for the hideous
task, going up & down those infernal houses.
(Sinclair to Mew, 8 March 1914)

Sinclair had in fact already found somewhere else to live, and Mew‘s
desperate anxiety to please could not be lessened by letters such as these.
Soon after the flat-hunting episode, Sinclair again attempted to contain the
developing complications of their intimacy:

Better to take things simply & never go back on them, or analyse them, isn’t it?
I, (who am so complicated),took it all quite simply & was glad of it - of yr.
being here, of yr. talking to me - well, why can’t you do the same?
(Sinclair to Mew, 14 May 1914)

And yet Sinclair knew that her own emotions, and even her own aesthetic,
lacked something that the far less successful and experienced Mew had
almost to excess: ’depths & depths of passion & of sheer beauty’, as
 Charlotte Mew and May Sinclair: A love-song 5

Sinclair put it in a letter of January 1915. As a reader of her own poems,

Mew was hypnotic; and her mesmerised attraction to Sinclair pushed
Sinclair into repeated disavowals of her own possibilities. ’You read
furiously well: I never knew anybody who cd. get out the passion of a
thing as you can . . . I sd. be afraid to let you read anything of mine aloud -
you’d put into it all that it ought to have had & hadn’t & oh! how flat it wd.
fall afterwards!‘ (Sinclair to Mew, 6 January 1915).Mew’s inability to deny
or discount the body, and the passion of her readings (she would go alone
to Sinclair‘s lodgings and perform her own poems), at once sustained and
muted the relationship, allowing Sinclair, in the end, to avoid responsi-
bility for the intensity in which she too was deeply implicated.
For in July 1916 Sinclair’s letters to Mew cease abruptly. ‘Charlotte has
been bothering and annoying May’, wrote Catherine Dawson Scott in her
diary. Rebecca West and G. B. Stern reported that Sinclair had told them
that ’“a lesbian poetess”, Charlotte Mew, had chased her upstairs into the
bedroom’.ll Alida Klementaski (later Harold Monro’s wife) wrote in her
1953 memoir of Charlotte Mew about ‘May Sinclair, now almost forgotten,
with whom [Charlotte] had a very complete friendship, until something
she heard about Miss Sinclair destroyed it forever.’12It is by no means clear
from these comments whose desire, or whose resistance, was at stake. The
three-year correspondence between them makes it clear that, at least at
first, Sinclair was making gestures of fending Charlotte Mew off. She
seems at times to have avoided seeing her, writing apologetically from
Yorkshire that she is sorry to have missed her, but she has been and is very
busy (see, for example, the letters of 18 September 1913, 17 October 1913,
and 24 December 1913). Later letters are less equivocal: she wrote in
response to an invitation in mid-1914: ‘I’d ever so much rather see you
when you are by yourself (though I like Mrs Dawson Scott very much)‘
(6 May 1914). For Sinclair this was a very rare gesture of interest and
intimacy. Yet in the end Mew‘s interest in her seems to have proved too
much for her, and there is no sign that there was any further communi-
cation between them after 1916. It is the dynamics of this kind of estrange-
ment that I shall examine in this essay. For the work of both women is
preoccupied with the power of unfulfilled desire. For Sinclaix such desire
meant life, and for Mew, it meant death. After the rift between them in
1916, Sinclair went on to produce some of her greatest fiction: Mary Ofivier,
A Life in 1919, and The Life and Death of Harriett Frean in 1922. Mew barely
wrote another line, her insistent poetic voice finally silenced by one dis-
appointment too many.
Mew and Sinclair shared an intense interest in Emily Bronte, and both
published on her. The terms of their critique of her work seem at times to
6 Critical Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3

foreshadow the terms on which their own relationship would be con-

ducted. Mew’s essay, ‘The Poems of Emily Bronte’, appeared in Temple Bar
in 1904; and Sinclair’s numerous volumes of Bronte scholarship (intro-
ductions to six novels in the Everyman edition, and a book-length study,
The Three Brontes, 1912) were published between 1907 and 1914. The verbal
echoes between Sinclair‘s chapter on Emily Bronte in The Three Brontes,
and Mew’s essay eight years earlier, suggest that Sinclair already knew
Mew‘s work before she met her in 1913.
The emphasis in Mew’s essay is on Emily Bronte’s isolation, her reserve
and her passion. Mew draws attention to the unearthly element in some of
her poems, and in Wuthering Heights:
.
She calls up spirits with a spirit’s hand . . Never perhaps has passion been
portrayed as she portrayed it - wayward and wild as storm, but pure as fire,
as incorruptible as life’s own essence - deathless in the face of death.
(CPP, 363)
Sinclair too wrote of the ‘vibration of the supernatural’ in Bronte‘s work,
and of her ’ghostly and immaterial passion’.13 Both also emphasised the
paradox of her apparently celibate life and the violent passion of her books.
Mew commented that:
Mrs Browning and Christina Rossetti, among whose writings passion, exotic
and mystical, plays so conspicuous a part, have never surpassed, if they have
ever equalled, this love-song of a woman who never loved. (CPP, 365)
And Sinclair:
When Emily wrote of passion, she wrote of a thing that, as far as she was
concerned, not only was not and had not been, but never could be.14
Mew and Sinclair were both drawn to this idea of a sexual and emotional
absence, which, as Sinclair remarked, was not ‘frustration, but . . . com-
plete and satisfying pos~ession’.~~ For Mew, this kind of erotic absence
would, in spite of its attraction, finally drive her to desperation. Sinclair,
however, actively craved fulfilment through self-denial: a passion that
would allow her the ecstasy of austerity, just as Emily Bronte, in Sinclair’s
words, had lived out ’a superb refusal of all extravagance, pomp, and
decoration’.16 Emily Bronte represented the ideal, a woman whose
passions flared and were quenched in the twilight world of the imagin-
ation, fuelled by the energy of her own repression. Mew commented on
the strangely disembodied quality of her vision:
It is said that her genius was masculine, but surely it was purely spiritual,
strangely and exquisitely severed from embodiment and freed from any
accident of sex. (CPP, 363)
 Charlotte Mew and May Sinclair: A love-song 7

In a poignant phrase, Sinclair too wrote of Healthcliff’s and Catherine’s

ignorance of ’the sad secrets of the body’.l7 For Mew and Sinclair, Emily
Bronte‘s achievement was to have found a language for desire which was
exactly not the language of the body’s secrets or of the random accidents of
gender. I shall be arguing that for May Sinclair, such a language was the
language of sublimation.
At the time of her last existing letter to Charlotte Mew, in August 1916,
Sinclair was at her summer retreat in Reeth, Yorkshire, where she had
gone, so she said, to ‘work violently’ on a ‘psychological & metaphysical‘
book (Sinclair to Mew, 4 August 1916). Two small sections of the book
were published in the Medical Press and Circular as review-lectures of a new
translation and collection of Jung’s papers which had appeared in 1916.18
The final (incomplete) typescript of the volume is headed The Way of Subli-
mation, and it appears to have been neither finished nor published. Yet the
book represents a valuable intervention into the psychoanalytic scene by
someone who was heavily involved in the early institutionalisation of
psychoanalysis in this country (May Sinclair was one of the founders of the
Medico-PsychologicalClinic).I9
This text offers a crucial insight into Sinclair’s understanding of the
psychic operation of sublimation, with which she was very concerned at
this particular crisis in her life (she laid aside the novel she was writing in
1916 to spend a frenetic three months on the book). The surviving draft
bears witness to the considerable complexity of Sinclair’s response to the
articulation of women’s desire by the psychoanalytic institutions with
which she was so heavily involved (Charlotte Mew, for example, was
advised several times by Sinclair that the Medico-Psychological Clinic was
taking up all her time in the early months of their friendship). Sinclair’s
reaction to the growing psychoanalytic visibility of women’s desire, and to
the intensity of her relationship with Charlotte Mew, was to formulate an
aesthetic which foreclosed upon the possibility of sexual pleasure and
implicitly set up sexual contact as the enemy of creativity.
In The Way of Sublimation, May Sinclair reads sublimation and repression
through a Darwinian framework, associating sublimation with a fruitful
and forward-moving future, and repression with an inhibiting and sterile
past. She conflates repression and regression to suggest that sublimation
and repression are in direct conflict with one another:
Every psychosis, every psychoneurosis is an Atavism, a reversion to the
primitive, infantile type. Part of the patient’s psyche is cut off from the
inexorably adult world it has come into and belongs to, (WS,31)
8 Critical Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3

As the libido struggles, in her words, to ’sublimate itself’, the ’Angel of

Repression, the psychic censor’ stands before all the possible paths to
sublimation, blocking the way (WS, 31). It is the task of the psychoanalyst
to undo repression and initiate the work of sublimation in its place: the
patient ‘understands perfectly that psychoanalysis is only a means to an
ultimate psycho-synthesis, and he is lured by the vision of that ”Subli-
mation” which is held out before him as the end’.20 Psychic health is
equated with an ultimate sublimation in which all the libido is trans-
formed: ‘always it is a question of the more or less completeness of the
transformation’.21
This version of the aim of an analysis is linked to a particular interpre-
tation of the teleology of life itself. Not only is the psyche seeking ever
more thorough transformations, so too is the species.
Sublimation itself is the striving of the Libido towards manifestation in higher
and higher forms. The history of evolution is its History. You might almost
say off-hand that the higher organism is the sublimation of the lower, the
animal of the plant, placental mammal of the reptile, the ape-man of the
anthropoid ape. (WS,24)
In this hierarchy it is clear that the more the libido is sublimated, the better
for both the species and the individual. Sinclair declared that sublimation
was essential to what she called ‘civilisation’, and especially to culture: ’all
religion, all art, all literature, all science are sublimations in various stages
of perfection’ (WS, 22). Culture depended on the transformation of the
libido and on its diversion away from directly sexual aims.
However, Sinclair explicitly rejected Freud’s notion that the libido
represented a primarily sexual energy. She sought to expand and extend
its definition, at times wanting to call it ‘the Will-to-love’, at others simply
’Will’, and at others simply ‘Love’ (WS, 137).Much of her interest in subli-
mation demonstrates a desire to identify other forms of creative energy
than the sexual, and her insistence that libidinal transformation is essential
to all aspects of modern life vehemently denies the centrality of conscious
sexual desire to modern subjectivities. She comments that Freud’s empha-
sis on sex ’revolts and depresses US',^ and yet her extensive use of the
term ‘sublimation’ betrays an uneasy sense of sex’s insistence. Further-
more, she does come close, like Freud, to asserting the perversity of desire,
its resistance and intractability.
When we come to man, we have to deal with a species that has, presumably,
stored up in it an amount of libido out of all proportion to its organic needs
. . . In man we have a creature in whom the libido is actually in conflict with
itself and with its own sublimation. (WS, 25)
 Charlotte Mew and May Sinclair: A love-song 9

It was this internal conflict that Sinclair so feared, believing it drew the
organism back into a less ’civilised’ state, and blocked the energy necessary
for the creation of any form of art or culture.
The body and its power to create were implicated in sublimation in
another, acutely distressing way, for both Sinclair and Mew. Both women
were grimly aware of a difficult heredity within their own families. Of May
Sinclair’s five brothers, four died before their fifties of hereditary heart
disease. Charlotte Mew’s brother Henry, and sister Freda, were both
schizophrenic and died in mental hospitals, Henry in 1901and Freda many
years after Charlotte’s own death. In her will Charlotte took care to leave
f2,200 in trust for Freda’s maintenance. These family tragedies meant that
both women were acutely aware of their own genetic histories. Alida
Monro tells us in her memoir of Charlotte Mew that both Charlotte and
Anne had made a conscious decision never to marry and have children for
fear of passing on the mental ‘taint’, as they saw it.23We know nothing of
May Sinclair’s personal decisions on the matter. But she was preoccupied
with issues of heredity, both in her fictional and nonfictional texts; and her
childlessness and possible celibacy may have been in part a response to her
knowledge of the heart condition that ran in her family. Charlotte Mew
seems to have thought of her heredity as a kind of personal disgrace. It was
only after her death that her close friend Alida Monro learnt of the exist-
ence of her ’insane’ brother and sister. For Charlotte Mew, theirs were two
more dramas that had to be hidden or suppressed.
May Sinclair, with a less ’shameful’ family secret - hers was physical
rather than mental illness - had an altogether more robust attitude to the
issue. For her, sublimation was a way of escaping genetic history as well as
sexual feeling. In one of her clinical lectures on sublimation, she describes
it as ’the freedom of the self in obedience to a higher law than preceding
generations have laid upon him’.” Sublimation is an escape from the
parental body, as well as from one’s own: allegiance to a higher truth than
the reproductive. What is being identified here, as in her remarks on
libidinal conflict which I quoted earlier, is the excess of the individual over
the species. Freud had said something similar in ”’Civilised” Sexual
Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’, written in 1908 and translated into
English in 1915. Here he suggests that ’a part of the sexual excitation which
is provided by the subject’s own body is inhibited as being unserviceable
for the reproductive function and in favourable cases is brought to subli-
mati~n’.*~ Only what he calls ‘the perverse elements of sexual excitation’ are
sublimated; and ‘the constitution of people suffering from inversion - the
homosexuals - is, indeed, often distinguished by their sexual instinct’s
10 Critical Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3

possessing a special aptitude for cultural sublimation’.26Uncharacter-

istically for Freud, he seems momentarily to lose sight of the perverse
excess of all desire, including that which is read as heterosexual. It is
indicative too of the difficulty Freud has in dealing with the question of
reproduction that it is taken for granted that we know exactly which
elements of ’sexual excitation‘ are ’necessary’ for reproduction. The critical
relation between the desire to have sex and the desire to have children is
interpreted elsewhere by Freud as a grounding moment in the girl‘s devel-
opment as a heterosexual (the desire for a ’penis-baby’ from the father),27
but this version of events exactly eclipses the girl’s desire for a baby, and
still leaves us wondering just what kind of sex it is that we want to have
when we wish to conceive. Is it sex that we want at all? Many lesbians
would say no.
May Sinclair’s formulation of the excess or perversity of desire avoids
Freud’s reliance on an untheorised version of the ’reproductive function’.
As we saw earlier, in her words, desire is the proportion of the libido
which is not needed for ‘organic needs’ (WS, 25). Some might argue that
reproduction is an ’organic need’ of sorts, but it seems clear that Sinclair
has in mind the libido simply as a mechanism for the individual’s survival,
producing the desire for food and water. Her theorising of human
sexuality in The Way of Sublimation denies the ‘reproductive function’
(although it must be noted that in much earlier texts, such as M r and Mrs
Nevi11 Tyson, 1898 and The Helpmate, 1907, May Sinclair was one of the very
few novelists of her time to attempt to write about maternal eroticism and
the desire for a child). But in the summer of 1916 Sinclair found sublimation
an ideal way of thinking about her own desire. In her version, sublimation
neutralises the sexual urgency of which she had become aware in her
relations with Charlotte Mew; and in believing that in sublimation lay the
key to creativity, she could both persuade herself towards, and feel justi-
fied in retreating from, Mew’s desperate demands. Adapting Freud’s
wording in order to diminish his emphasis on the libido’s link with repro-
duction, she nonetheless seems to have accepted his idea that there was
something perverse or conflicted in the excessiveness of desire, in its
disproportion to the actual anatomy of sex. Confronted with Charlotte
Mew’s, and perhaps her own desires, her personal emotional and sexual
economy, as well as her aesthetic philosophy were on the line. Sexual ful-
filment seemed incompatible with the creative sublimation so dear to her
heart and mind. In extolling sublimation, Sinclair was implicitly acknowl-
edging the value of perversity, but only when it was duly suppressed or
displaced. For her personally, perversity had another value. It allowed her
to transcend her inheritance by refusing to reproduce. It was not just
 Charlotte Mew and May Sinclair: A love-song 11

sublimation, but a sense of herself as ’perverse’, that allowed her, as she

said, ’the freedom of the self in obedience to a higher law than preceding
generations have laid upon’ her.28 That law was autonomy: the transcen-
dence not only of biological, but also of sexual, convention; and the dis-
covery of a new, creative self from which to write.
For Sinclair, sublimation was a triumph. It made sense in both artistic
and emotional terms. For Charlotte Mew, however, the ’transformation’ of
desire was less straightforward. The last section of my paper will focus on
Mew’s work, and her exploration of grief and death in relation to desire.
As May Sinclair herself realised, desire could be more or less completely
sublimated. ‘It is not enough to transfer; you must transform. Always it is
a question of the more or less completeness of the transformati~n.’~~ When
the transformation was incomplete, a ’perverse’ desire was left still seeking
its aim. It was in the abyss of this conflict that frustration and loss yawned.
In an early draft of her notes on Charlotte Mew, Alida Monro commented
on the fact that ‘many of the poems . . . show an intense preoccupation
with death and disaster either physical or spiritual’. Monro attributed this
to ‘the tribulations and batterings of her personal life’,30and it was perhaps
that perversity that she had not managed to displace into art, that haunted
Charlotte Mew, shaped her aesthetic project, plunged her again and again
into obsessive and embarrassing passions. It was as though something
within her had been imperfectly laid to rest. Her desires inhabited a liminal
zone where they were neither fully sublimated nor ever satisfied. Hence,
perhaps, her eroticisation of death and her obsession with hair, that part of
the body that does not decay like the flesh but remains on the boundary
between death and life. Hair, as we shall see, is the central image in many
of her greatest poems.
Images of half-stifled desire are scattered throughout Mew‘s work. Her
poem ‘Saturday Market’ (CPP, 33), included in the 1921, revised edition of
her collection The Fanner’s Bride, is a clear evocation of Christina Rossetti’s
’Goblin Market’, with its vivid lesbian eroticism. But in Mew‘s poem, the
protagonist walks alone through a busy market with a terrible secret
hidden beneath her shawl: a secret that, if she showed it, would set the
market ’grinning from end to end/ Girls and gaffers and boys of twenty‘.
Besieged like Laura and Lizzie by goblins, Charlotte Mew‘s woman has
something much more macabre to offer or to withhold:
See, you, the shawl is wet, take out from under
The red dead thing - In the white of the moon
On the flags does it stir again? Well, and no wonder!
Best make an end of it; bury it soon.
12 Critical Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3

If there is blood on the hearth who’ll know it?

Or blood on the stairs,
When a murder is over and done why show it?
In Saturday Market nobody cares.

The abortion or miscarriage is imagined here with a nightmarish intensity

as something that struggles for life amid an indifferent and jeering world.
The woman’s secret is the shame of her desire, but also of her aggression:
she kills the child, like Hetty Sorrel, lest it should betray her, but her
murderous act is also that which condemns her. The ‘red dead thing’ is
also the ’sad secret’ of Mew herself: the children that would never be born
both because of her family history, and because of her lesbianism. In the
urban jostle of the market - metaphor for the world - there is no privacy
and no refuge. The woman returns to her bed for a kind of death-in-life, ‘a
long, long rest’ - either the rest of suicide (’with a hole in your breast’) or
the rest of the body without a heart, without pleasure or fertility: the kind
of lesbian body that Mew imagined for herself.
In another poem, ‘Fame’, it is dreams that are killed and left out to rot:
One little dream, no matter how small, how wild.
Just now, I think I found it in a field, under a fence -
A frail, dead, new-born lamb, ghostly and pitiful and white,
A blot upon the night,
The moon’s dropped child!
(CPP, 3)
The moon, goddess of virginity and of fertility, presides over this im-
perfectly abandoned desire, dead, but, like the spirit-world, still haunting
the land of the living. In some poems, it is not the foetus but the heart and
desire itself that is aborted:
Then lie you there
Dear and wild heart behind this quivering snow
With two red stains on it.
(’The Forest Road’, CPP, 22)
In all these poems it is the interplay of white and red - the red of passion
and the white of innocence and frigidity - that dramatises the conflict
between the wildness of desire and its austerity.
All these images dramatise the agony of renunciation. Mew’s decision to
avoid pregnancy and childbirth becomes symbolic of a whole series of
avoidances and repressions: the denial of desire of all kinds. It is hard not
to remember Mew‘s long series of tormented and unconsummated lesbian
loves: Lucy Harrison, Ella d’Arcy, and finally May Sinclair. The unborn
child implies the emptiness of Mew’s own body, its self-imposed sterility
 Charlotte Mew and May Sinclair: A love-song 13

and its inability to bring any of its desires to fruition. The child that she
never had (mentioned in her most famous long poem, ’Madeleine in
Church’, as ‘the child who went or never came’, CPP, 25) becomes the
child to whom she denied life. Yet it is exactly the persistence of desire,
desire’s refusal to die, that is insisted upon. Menstrual blood is spilt in vain
as the body mourns its own sterility, but it is the glorious wastefulness, the
excess of that spilling on which Mew dwells:
Red is the strangest pain to bear;
In Spring the leaves on the budding trees;
In Summer the roses are worse than these;
More terrible than they are sweet:
A rose can stab you across the street
Deeper than any knife:
And the crimson haunts you everywhere -
Thin shafts of sunlight, like the ghosts of reddened swords have struck our
stair
As if, coming down, you had spilt your life.
(’The Quiet House’, CPP, 18)
This compulsive fascination with the dead, with the spillage of the body, is
also the inscription of a desire perceived as perverse, in excess: that part
of the desire that has not been transformed into the drive to create or
reproduce.
Yet the extraordinary power of many of Mew‘s images lies in desire’s
fierce refusal to act out its own death. Part of the fascination of sexual
hunger is its obduracy in the face of attempts at sublimation, something
even May Sinclair recognised when she wrote of partial or incomplete
sublimations. Freud too was convinced, controversially, that women’s
ability to sublimate was inadequate and held them firmly in the appetites
and perversities of their own bodies.31 Sinclair’s interest in Mew, intensi-
fied as we saw by the furious passion of Mew‘s poetry readings, was
closely tied to the desperation with which Mew faced the task of suppress-
ing her own desire, so prone to embarrassing excess. In the poetry this
desperation appears as a quasi-necrophiliac sexualising of those parts of
the body which cannot quite be seen as flesh, cannot quite be seen as part
of the living beloved. We have already seen how Charlotte Mew dwells on
those products of the female body which escape its confines: the aborted
foetus, menstrual blood - exactly the woman’s refusal of the ‘reproductive
function’. The space of such matter, what Julia Kristeva would call the
’abject’,3*is exactly the space of the woman’s perversity, in Freud’s terms:
it is in her miscarrying, in her bleeding, in her failure to conceive, that her
body demonstrates how much more it is than her reproductive function,
and how much that more is her desire.
14 Critical Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3

But blood is not the only female product that Charlotte Mew eroticises.
She also repeatedly produces sexualised images of women’s hair, and it is
to these that I shall turn in the last part of my paper. I shall suggest that
Mew develops a specifically female language of hair‘s erotics that chal-
lenges and develops Freud’s images of hair as the signal of a lack, one of
the classic fetish objects that disavows castration.% In Mew’s poetry hair
becomes that which is kept when the beloved is gone: it signifies the
fullness and durability of sex. As she says in ’The FGte‘, ’only the hair of
any woman can belong to God’ (CPP, 7).
The title-poem of her 1916 volume, The Fanner’s Bride, is written from the
point of view of a young farmer whose new wife, afraid of ’love and me
and all things human’ (CPP, 1)fled their home and was fetched back and
put under lock and key. The poem is full of yearning, implicitly for a child
and explicitly for the woman he loves but cannot have. Her hair signifies
both her desirability and her unattainability:
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!
(CPP, 2)
Hair represents at once the fullness, the present excess of desire, and that
absence of the genital body that Freud would call castration. Hair taunts
with a vision of absolute femininity (the wife is ‘sweet as the first wild
violets’, CPP, 2), but also flaunts its own inability to deliver it. From this
impossible vision comes the desperate repetition of the farmer’s desire in
which the object is invoked simply as itself: ‘her hair, her hair’.
Hair becomes the central erotic image in another poem from the same
volume, ‘The Forest Road’. Here the speaker watches over the sleeping
beloved and wishes that she could leave her in God’s keeping, tender and
close when she wakes. The desire to bring rest to the beloved is indis-
tinguishable from the desire to bring about her death, and again the hair is
imagined as that which remains, that which holds and sustains desire
when the body is absent or lost.
Oh! your hair! If you had lain
A long time dead on the rough, glistening ledge
Of some black cliff, forgotten by the tide,
The raving winds would tear, the dripping brine would rot away
Fold after fold of all the loveliness
That wraps you round, and makes you, lying here,
The passionate fragrance that roses are.
 Charlotte Mew and May Sinclair: A love-song 15

But death would spare the glory of your head

In the long sweetness of the hair that does not die:
The spray would leap to it in every storm,
The scent of the unsilenced sea would linger on
In these dark waves, and round the silence that was you -
Only the nesting gulls would hear - but there would still be whispers in your
hair;
Keep them for me; keep them for me.
(CPP,21)
Hair speaks the body’s decay, worn away by the salty fluids of the sea and
of women’s bodies; but hair keeps the memory of those fluid passions, of
the body that was. Indeed in the poem desire is focused not on the body of
the beloved but on its metonymic representation by the beloved’s own
hair, in which the body is helplessly figured: ’keep them for me; keep them
for me.’ In ‘The Forest Road’ the impossibility of the desire for another
body is imaged in the emphasis on the desire for representation, for speech
and language. The body is always lost, and as the lover watches the be-
loved sleep she sees already only ’the silence that was you’, the silence into
which words and hair, crossing the boundaries between life and death,
must surely come.
What we do not know about Mew and Sinclair’s intimacy should perhaps
alert us to the silence and death at the heart of desire itself. It is clear that
the rift between them indicates some kind of psychic and sexual difficulty,
but we will never know exactly what kind of difficulty that was. I have
attempted to suggest some of the complex psychic operations behind
sexual refusals, and to map the relation between writing, refusal and
desire. For Sinclair, the end of the relationship signified the triumph of her
personal philosophy of sublimation, and released her to produce some of
her best work. There is no sign anywhere in any of her personal papers
that she ever once missed Charlotte Mew. Mew even before she met
Sinclair had developed an erotics and a poetics that concentrated on the
attractions of loss. But when that loss was acted out, for the third time in
her life, with May Sinclair, the disappointment seemed almost to have
broken her: ’the things that kill us live’, she wrote (’The Quiet House’,
CPP, 19). For loss is mainly attractive in our fantasies of our own desire. As
Charlotte Mew knew, actual loss can kill.
But our story is not quite over yet. In the late 1920s May Sinclair gradually
succumbed to Parkinson’s disease. She lived out the last fifteen years of
her life in a kind of silent twilight, tended by her companion, Florence
Bartrop. She died in 1946. Charlotte Mew never recovered from the death
of her sister Anne in 1927. Alida Monro tells us that she ‘tortured herself
with the idea that as she had not had a vein opened in Anne’s wrist her
16 Critical Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3

sister might have been buried alive‘ (CPP,xii). Charlotte Mew drank a
bottle of Lysol on 24 March 1928, after admitting herself to a nursing home.
She was found, still alive, by the matron, lying on her bed and muttering
to herself. She died not long afterwards. May Sinclair found sustained
intimacy outside her family; Charlotte Mew did not. Indeed there is little to
celebrate in Mew‘s not-so-brief life, except the words that she has left us,
which seem to give the lie to Sinclair’s idea that desire’s sublimation was
ever truly achievable.

Notes
1 See Penelope Fitzgerald, Charlotte Mew and her Friends (London: Collins,
1984), 133. Unless stated otherwise, information about Charlotte Mew in the
text is derived from this volume.
2 Quoted in Fitzgerald, Charlotte M e w and her Friends, 174.
3 H.D., ’The Farmer’s Bride’, The Egoist, vol. 111, no. 9 (September 1916), 135.
4 Virginia Woolf to R. C. Trevelyan, 25 January 1920, in The Question of Things
Happening: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1912-1922, ed. Nigel Nicolson and
Joanne Trautmann (London: Chatto and Windus, 1976), 419.
5 See Virginia Woolf’s diary entry for 17 October 1924, in The Dia y of Virginia
Woolf: Volume 2, 1920-1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie
(London: Hogarth, 1978), 319.
6 Ibid., 317-18.
7 Charlotte Mew, Collected Poems and Prose, ed. Val Warner (London: Virago,
1982). Further references in the text will be to CPP.
8 May Sinclair, The Combined Maze (London: Hutchinson, 1913), 324.
9 Ibid., 218.
10 May Sinclair’s letters to Charlotte Mew are preserved in the Henry W. and
Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden
Foundations. Further references in the text will be to letters in this archive.
11 From a letter from G. 8. Stern to T. E. M. Boll, quoted in T. E. M. Boll, ’The
Mystery of Charlotte Mew and May Sinclair: An Inquiry’, Bulletin of the New
York Public Libray, vol. 74 (1970), 445-53; 453.
12 Alida Monro, ‘CharlotteMew - A Memoir’, in Collected Poems of Charlotte Mew
(London: Duckworth, 1953), vii-xx; p. xv.
13 May Sinclair, The Three Brontes (London: Hutchinson, 1912), 223.
14 Ibid., 170.
15 Ibid., 170.
16 Ibid., 186.
17 Ibid., 215.
18 May Sinclair, ‘Symbolism and Sublimation 1’, Medical Press and Circular, 153
(9 August 1916), 118-22; ‘Symbolism and Sublimation 11’, Medical Press and
Circular, 153 (16 August 1916), 142-5. Sinclair was reviewing C. G. Jung,
Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology, ed. Constance E. Long (London:
BailliPre, Tindall and Cox, 1916).
19 For a more extended discussion of May Sinclair and the Medico-Psychological
Clinic, see Theophilus E. M. Boll, ‘May Sinclair and the Medico-Psychological
 Charlotte Mew and May Sinclair: A love-song 17

Clinic of London’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 106,

no. 4 (August 1962), 310-26; and Theophilus E. M. Boll, Miss May Sinclair:
Novelist, A biographical and critical introduction (Cranbury, New Jersey: Associ-
ated University Presses, 1973). The holograph manuscript and two copies of
the typescript of The Way of Sublimation are preserved in the May Sinclair
Papers, Special Collections, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania.
Further references in the text will be to WS. Page numbers correspond to the
corrected numberings in the top copy of the typescript.
20 Sinclair, ’Symbolism and Sublimation 1’, op. cit., 119.
21 Sinclair, ’Symbolism and Sublimation 11’, op. cit., 143.
22 Ibid., 144.
23 Monro, ’Charlotte Mew - A Memoir’, op. cit., xiii.
24 Sinclair, ‘Symbolism and Sublimation 11’, op. cit., 144. For further discussion
of this issue, see Susanne Stark, ’Overcoming Butlerian Obstacles: May
Sinclair and the Problem of Biological Determinism’, Women’s Studies, 21
(1992), 265-83.
25 Sigmund Freud, ‘“Civilised” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’,
in Civilisation, Society and Religion, ed. Albert Dickson, Penguin Freud Library,
12 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 27-56; pp. 40-1.
26 Ibid., 41, 42.
27 See, for example, Freud, ’Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical
Distinctions between the Sexes’, in On Sexuality, ed. Angela Richards,
Penguin Freud Library, 7 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 323-43; p. 340.
28 Sinclair, ’Symbolism and Sublimation II’, op. cit., 144.
29 Ibid., 143.
30 Alida Monro on Charlotte Mew, no title or page numbers, British Museum
Add. MSS. 57755. I am grateful to the British Library, and Freda McGregor,
for permission to quote from this manuscript.
31 See, for example, Freud, ’Civilisation and Its Discontents’, in Civilisation,
Society and Religion, op. cit., 244-340; p. 293.
32 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S . Roudiez
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
33 See Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head’, in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip
Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 212-13.