ABSTRACT
Charlotte Mew’s body of work exists temporally, generically, and conceptually at crossroads; the British writer’s career, as both poet and fiction writer, spans the Victorian and Modern periods, and her protagonists/speakers often mirror Mew’s own state of betweenness in their struggles with mortality and embodiment, memory and myth, and the status of love in fin-de-siècle society. In this essay, I turn to her ignored fictional works in order to unpack their relative critical neglect by analyzing the peculiar mode of “betweenness” that these stories explore. I argue that Mew’s stories, moreso than her poems, trouble a clean literary trajectory from the Victorian to the Modern era, instead of evincing an erratic relationship to time and genre in an effort to unpack the particular limitations besetting modern love.
