Charlotte Mew & Friends
Decadent and Modernist Networks
Virtual Symposium
9 July 2021
'Far and away the best living female poet, who will be read when others are forgotten'
— Thomas Hardy
Keynote Speaker
17:00-18:00
Professor Joseph Bristow
University of California, Los Angeles
Joseph Bristow is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he conducts much of his research on aesthetes and decadents at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. In recent years, he has published on the poetry of Olive Custance (Victorian Poetry [2019]), Margaret Sackville (Decadence in an Age of Modernism [2019]), and Michael Field (Michael Field: Decadent Moderns [2019]), as well as on the fiction of E. M. Forster (Twenty-First-Century Readings of Forster’s Maurice [2020]) and Elizabeth Bowen (Irish University Review [2022]). Next spring, Yale University Press publishes his most recent book, Oscar Wilde on Trial: The Criminal Proceedings—from Arrest to Imprisonment. At present, he is editing a collection of critical essays, Extraordinary Aesthetes, on fin-de-siècle writers, and he is also co-editing (with Yvonne Ivory and Rebecca N. Mitchell) two volumes of Oscar Wilde’s uncollected, unfinished, and miscellaneous writings for Oxford University Press. He has a long-standing interest in the life and work of Charlotte Mew. His essay, “Charlotte Mew’s Aftereffects,” appeared in Modernism/modernity in 2009, and his chapter on “Female Decadence,” which discusses Mew’s “Passed,” is included in British Women Writers, 1880-1920 (2016).
This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew
An evening with Julia Copus
19:30-20:30
We are delighted to host this public event to discuss the new biography of Mew, This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew (Faber, 2021).
This is the first comprehensive biography, from cradle to grave, and is written by fellow poet Julia Copus, who recently unveiled a blue plaque on Mew’s childhood house in Doughty Street and was the editor of the Selected Poetry and Prose (2019).
Julia Copus was born in London, near to the Young Vic theatre, and now lives in Somerset. Her two previous collections, The Shuttered Eye and In Defence of Adultery, were both Poetry Book Society Recommendations. She has won First Prize in the National Poetry Competition and the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (2010). She also writes for radio; her first play, Eenie Meenie Macka Racka, was awarded the BBC's Alfred Bradley prize. She is a Lector for the Royal Literary Fund, and in 2008 was made an Honorary Fellow at the University of Exeter.
@MewFriends
