ABSTRACT
The history of twentieth-century British women poets is one of stops and starts, of discontinuities. Particularly in the transition from early to mid-century, later women poets often knew little about their immediate predecessors, who were marginalized even within their poetic communities. Despite Harold Monro and Alida Klementaski’s efforts, Mew and Wickham were never included in the Georgian anthologies that could have popularized their work. Informal women’s networks existed, as we have already seen with the salons of Sappho and Natalie Barney, but these could be problematic as well. The story of Sitwell and Mew’s meeting, recounted by Victoria Glendinning in A Unicom Among Lions, gives us a glimpse of the barriers that divided women poets, preventing even the most casual of friendships. Sitwell admired her predecessor’s poetry and would seem to have been the supporter the reticent Mew needed, since Sitwell was notoriously ferocious in championing those she deemed talented. But Sitwell’s only defense of Mew came in a 1929 Criterion review, written after Mew’s death as a kind of elegy: ‘At her best, she clove down to the bedrock, and everything was laid bare.’3 Even with Sitwell’s respect, the only meeting between these two women poets proved to be a failure.
