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.

[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.

[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.

[12] Entitled "Passed," it was inspired by Mew's activities as a volunteer social worker and concerns a distressed woman, suggested to be a prostitute,[13] who leads the narrator to a room where her sister lies dead.

It earned her the admiration of Sydney Cockerell and drew respect for her as a poet from writers such as Sara Teasdale, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf.

[14][16] Her poems are varied: some of them (such as "Madeleine in Church") are passionate discussions of faith and the possibility of belief in God; others are proto-modernist in form and atmosphere ("In Nunhead Cemetery").

Mew gained the patronage of several literary figures, notably Thomas Hardy, who called her the best woman poet of her day; Virginia Woolf, who said she was "very good and interesting and quite unlike anyone else";[19] and Siegfried Sassoon.

In 1923, she obtained a Civil List pension of £75 per year with the aid of Cockerell, Hardy, John Masefield, and Walter de la Mare.

She descended into a deep depression and was admitted to the Beaumont Street Nursing Home in Marylebone,[14][21] where she committed suicide by drinking Lysol, a disinfectant.