Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends. Penelope Fitzgerald

and yet her face wore no look of loathing nor of pity. The expression was a divine one of habitual love.’

      Snow is falling as the narrator (who is never given a name) leaves the church, conscience-stricken. Her only chance of peace is to find the girl she rejected so cruelly the night before and make amends. But no one knows anything, no one can direct her, the search is useless. ‘Some months afterwards,’ in a large glittering shopping street, the girl walks past her, clinging to the arm of a man. Obviously she is now a prostitute, or, as Charlotte puts it, one of ‘the dazzling wares of the human mart’. And the man – the same man, of course, who seduced the sister – is wearing a buttonhole of scented violets. The story ends with ‘a laugh mounting to a cry.… Did it proceed from some defeated angel? Or the woman’s mouth? Or mine? God knows.’

      Passed seems almost as over-written as a story can be, hurrying along in distraught paragraphs, only just hanging on, for decency’s sake, to its rags of English grammar. Odd though it is, the elements are familiar. The overwrought narrator has something about her of Lucy Snow in Villette, and there are echoes of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘flash-eliciting, truth-extorting’ style. The pathos of the bunch of violets suggests a number of popular novels, in particular Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely But Too Well. The whole business of hurrying in desperation through a maze of mean streets is one of romance’s standbys. Dickens, if he didn’t invent it, used it to great effect for poor Florence Dombey and Little Dorrit. As to the blank encounter and the cry of despair at the end of Passed, not to mention the mumbling priest and the cynical seducer, they are part of the mythology of the nineteenth century’s unreal city.

      All the same, Passed makes its impact. Charlotte originally gave it the title Violets, but Passed gives a better sense of missed opportunity. Her story is impossible, but it is true. The real subject is guilt – the guilt of the provided-for towards the poor, the sane towards the mad, and the living towards the dead. The motive force is everything she had once half-understood about Miss Bolt and the disgraceful Fanny, all her feelings for her mad brother and sister, for her dead little brother and the dead Elizabeth Goodman, even for Anne. These had to be expressed in images, or they would have broken her.

      Harland loved Passed. True, he favoured hurrying-through-the-mean-streets stories, and was to accept some particularly absurd examples. But Passed seemed to him not only a remarkable literary achievement, but original, and therefore bound to be violently abused, which was just what The Yellow Book wanted. He wrote (28 April 1894) a letter of acceptance, with two qualifications – he couldn’t pay much, and he would like one or two ‘very trifling’ changes in the text. According to Harland, he had to read mountains of manuscripts every day, and nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand were rubbish. When he picked one up at random he assumed it would be worthless, but this time he had a strange presentiment, and had turned to his sub-editor and told him he felt he was going to make a great find. This, of course, is the way editors talk, American ones in particular. It gave Harland the opportunity to ask Charlotte to call on him at his flat, 144 Cromwell Road, at 3 p.m. the following Monday.

      Charlotte by this time had taken to wearing a mannish black velvet jacket and tweed skirt, as close as possible to Lucy Harrison’s style, but in a miniature version. Her manner was unpredictable, but it would have taken more than that to disconcert Harland, who was used to dealing with Aubrey Beardsley and his sister Mabel, ‘Graham Tomson’ and ‘George Egerton’ (who were both strong-minded women), the ambiguous Frederick Rolfe, and the novelist ‘Victoria Crosse’ who specialized in faintly moustached heroines. Charlotte, however, seems not to have set out to intrigue or amuse him, although she could have done both. She simply asked whether she could be paid at once. This in itself is an indication of how things were at 9 Gordon Street.