Mew was born in Bloomsbury, London, daughter of the architect Frederick Mew (1833-1898), who designed Hampstead Town Hall, and Anna Maria Marden (1837-1923), daughter of architect H. E. Kendall, for whom Frederick Mew had previously worked as an assistant. Frederick was the son of an innkeeper on the Isle of Wight.[2][3][4] The marriage produced seven children. Charlotte, nicknamed Lotti by her family, attended Gower Street School, where she was greatly influenced by the school's headmistress, Lucy Harrison,[5] and attended lectures at University College London.[6] The family moved to 9, Gordon Street in 1888, living in "genteel near-poverty";[2] her father died in 1898 without making adequate provision for his family. Two of her siblings suffered from mental illness and were committed to institutions,[5] and three others died in early childhood, leaving Charlotte, her mother, and her sister Anne.
Charlotte and Anne made a pact never to marry for fear of passing mental illness on to their children. Mew was likely a lesbian; according to Penelope Fitzgerald's account in Mew's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, after Mew's first short story was published in the Yellow Book journal, "she met and was deeply attracted to its dashing assistant editor, Ella D'Arcy. In 1902 she went to meet Ella in Paris, but the visit was a bitter disappointment. Ten years later she fell in love with the novelist May Sinclair, and apparently chased her into the bedroom, where she was humiliatingly rejected. Her divided nature made these emotional disasters particularly painful because her ladylike side ... totally disapproved of them."[2] One scholar believes that Charlotte was "almost certainly chastely lesbian".[7] However, a more recent biography by the poet Julia Copus questions some of these assumptions about Charlotte Mew. Copus mentions that Mew has "frequently been identified as a lesbian" including by Penelope Fitzgerald. Yet, she adds, there is also a rumour that Mew "conducted an illicit affair with Thomas Hardy". Copus argues that "such hypotheses occur when there is a vacuum surrounding a writer’s private life; we do not like to accept that no evidence can be found – or indeed that there may have been no active love life at all." The matter, Copus continues, is further compounded by the fact that Mew was exceptionally private and omitted even to provide biographical notes for anthologies.[8]
Mew had a strong sense of style: her friend and editor Alida Monro remembers her wearing distinctive red worsted stockings in the winter months, and she insisted on buying her black, button-up boots (in a tiny size 2) from Pinet's bootmakers in Mayfair; items left to different friends in her will (such as a "small three drop diamond pendant" and a "scarlet Chinese embroidered scarf") also suggest a keen interest in fashion.[9] In later years, she often dressed in masculine attire, adopting the appearance of a dandy.[10] Another biography by Julia Copus questions this notion of Charlotte Mew as a dandy, suggesting her attire was not quintessentially "masculine" as has been claimed in the past.[11]
