"FICTIONAL autobiography" immediately sets off alarm bells: it is downright arrogant, even contradictory, for a writer to presume sufficient knowledge of a historical figure to write their autobiography.

In Parris's and Charlotte Mew's case, however, the inherent dangers of the genre are dispelled by the evidence of Mew's poems and her biographer, Penelope Fitzgerald. It is well documented, for example, that most of Mew's family were mad, that most of her relationships were hangovers from an adolescent infatuation, and that she lived under an umbrella of fear and psychological torture. Parris's "fictional autobiography" of Mew is a far more loving self-portrait than Mew herself would have managed.

You could be forgiven for muttering, "But who the hell is Charlotte Mew?" She was a respected reviewer, essayist and short-story writer who, in her mid-twenties, found her true voice in poems. During her lifetime she was hailed by Virginia Woolf as "the greatest living poetess", and this opinion was supported by Siegfried Sassoon and Thomas Hardy. Indeed, Hardy's poem, "Dead Man Walking", is reputed to have been written when she refused to return his affections. Yet her work is largely forgotten or ignored now.

Mew's "refusal to love" was arguably the most demanding and angriest of the many ghosts with which she lived. Her emotional development was essentially arrested in her late teens when her elder brother went mad in 1888 and one of her younger sisters in 1889. Both were incarcerated in institutions where they later died, alone and neglected, with no family contact. Mew's mother, according to both Parris and Fitzgerald, was also rather unbalanced. When Charlotte was nearly twenty, she joined her surviving sister, Anne, in a vow of chastity, a vow which would prohibit the propagation of what they believed to be a genetic disposition to insanity. Parris, on this point, attributes to Mew the secret admission, In . . . refusing to love, I'd leapt, and I knew the rest of my life would be... an inevitable, unalterable succession of consequences. died of cancer in 1898, Mew's mother said: "You must be the man of the family, Charlotte." She took her new role seriously; she had her father's suits and overcoats altered to fit her five-foot frame and adopted an androgynous appearance which served to further distance her from the world and the temptation of men.

"Enshrined in memory like a patron saint", Mew's school-mistress, Lucy Harrison, haunted her even after more than twenty-five years with no contact. Upon hearing of her beloved mentor's death in 1915, Mew went into a serious decline, finding solace only in her work. There were other intense friendships with women: Ella D'Arcy, a fellow contributor to the Yellow Book, and, later, the novelist May Sinclair. Both relationships, however, harked back to Mew's unrealised love for her schoolmistress.

Mew's life was a perennial "season of ghosts", and rather like Elizabeth Bishop's last poems, her work revolved around loss, not least the loss of the opportunity to love. Mew remained haunted by Hardy. In 1892, at the age of twenty-three, she went with him to a performance of Hedda Gabler; afterwards, when he asked for her opinion, she objected to Hedda's suicide, and Hardy by way of reply asked: "Can't you imagine a time when one's life has become so unbearable that ending it is the only relief?" "Unimaginable," said Mew, according to Parris. Yet, 36 years later, shortly after Hardy's death, Mew took her own life by swallowing a bottle of Lysol, taking her virginity and her many ghosts and losses with her. Germaine Greer has said that this act alone marked the "beginning of an international vogue of poet suicide".

Parris's treatment of Charlotte Mew is sensitive and beautifully written and in keeping with the poet's voice. It is faithful to other documented evidence, and nowhere on the earth could anyone find a more compelling fictional character than Charlotte Mew. Bless this book. It may very well be what's needed to restore Charlotte Mew's work to the zenith that Woolf and Sassoon and Hardy had envisaged for it.

Ellen Beardsley is a writer and critic