Charlotte Raven, 1969–2025

As you might have seen, the journalist and writer Charlotte Raven died last week. I say ‘you might have seen’ because – despite being more-than-averagely-interested in Charlotte Raven – I actually hadn’t seen, and didn’t know, until Tobias said ‘Charlotte Raven!’ to me in That Way a few days later.

That her life drew such little fanfare felt like a signal of the peculiar unimpactfulness [not a real word, going with it anyway] of our cohort in British media, ‘our cohort’ being the over-educated humanities portion of Gen X. If anyone among this now-invisible crowd deserved a proper think piece, it was Raven. This isn’t a proper think piece, to be clear. But it is what I think about when I think about her.

When we started The Metropolitan just over three years ago we drew specific inspiration from The Modern Review, the magazine co-founded by Julie Burchill, Toby Young and Burchill’s then-husband Cosmo Landesman with contributions from Raven as well as Will Self, Nick Hornby and others (I still have a sneaking fondness for Jacques Peretti, who seems to mostly make documentaries these days). You should feel free to insert your own sighs at any point in this list; some of these people have expressed some unpleasant opinions over the years, and others are alleged to have done some nasty things.

That last sentence is a sentence that would never have appeared in the Modern Review. That was one of the reasons I immediately liked it (along with the fact that it produced the single greatest magazine cover of all time, if you were in your 20s in 1993). It refused to pussyfoot around; it had contempt for politically correct politesse. Politesse is necessary and helpful and courteous and good in many situations, but is the sworn enemy of good prose and the clear expression of complex ideas.

The Modern Review gloried in pith, in words and ideas in their most impactful (short) forms. Sure, sometimes (as with that Keanu Reeves cover) it just went for sensation, but mostly it was an intelligent and extraordinarily pleasurable read. When it came to politics it assumed not only that you would make up your own mind, but that anyone worth their salt would want to make up their own mind.

This position – that ideas and opinions should be presented in compulsive, intelligent, concise ways, and that readers should be given the choice to take ‘em or leave ‘em – went out of fashion pretty fast, along with the idea that the internet might remain free and open. Very few of us (definitely not me) stood up to defend it. Very few of us were prepared to say things we knew to be true, such as: Burchill in her prime was a fantastic writer, kinetic and hilarious, and gloriously impatient with bullshit. One of her Guardian columns about the casual deployment of child sexual abuse tropes in ‘edgy’ art made me punch the air, and I still use her line ‘I don’t want to pay someone to touch me up’ whenever someone suggests a spa day.

I’ve also never forgotten Burchill’s line about her short affair with Raven: she said they were not lesbians specifically, but that ‘I was a Charlottist and Charlotte was a Juliettist’. There was something very sweet and human about it, which contrasted with the lurid human drama that came out of the Modern Review office, viz:

• Camille Paglia and Julie Burchill having a truly nasty slagging match by fax, which was published in full in the magazine under the title ‘Fax off and die you bitch’;

• Burchill’s marriage to Landesman breaking down over Burchill and Raven’s affair;

• Raven sleeping with Toby Young because ‘it was bound to happen sooner or later so it was better to get it over with’; and

• Toby Young sabotaging the magazine up rather than let Raven become editor (booooo!)

I mean, they were only in business for four years. As Captain Sobel remarks in Band of Brothers after finding 200 condoms in a soldier’s foot locker, ‘How in God’s name is he going to have the strength to fight a war?’

I set out to write a short piece about Charlotte Raven and have instead written entirely about The Modern Review and Julie Burchill, which suggests another reason Raven’s death hasn’t attracted much attention; she wasn’t in it for the attention, or at least not only for the attention. Unusually among the magazine’s raging egos, she wasn’t a professional troll. She actually meant it.

For instance: I was moved when I read about her living arrangements with her ex-husband and their children, in which she lived downstairs and her ex and the kids lived upstairs, with the kids having free access to both parents, whatever hurt feelings or awkwardness this caused to the adults (and she said it caused plenty). Gen X know this is how divorcing parents should approach child custody, because plenty of us (or our school friends) were on the other end of it. We know that what should happen is that the kids stay in the house with their bedrooms and their computers and all their familiar stuff, and the adults – the ones who actually fucked up, and the ones who are better able to deal with the fall-out – should move in and out every week or find a way to live alongside each other, however difficult it might be. But very few of us ever put this into practice. In the moment — and I am speaking from personal experience here — we find all kinds of self-comforting reasons not to do it (and therefore to make our children do it instead). But Raven and her ex-husband did.

I’m not saying that Raven was ‘nice’; I have no idea whether she was or not, and I don’t think I care. She was the archetype of a certain kind of media presence, one that I don’t think has a mainstream analogue now. She represented a supremely ‘90s type of intelligent, principled adult woman, the daughters of ‘70s British leftism and second wave feminism. The particular flavour of this combination was unique to the UK thanks to its traditions of pragmatic socialism, internationalist and multicultural perspectives, media supremacy, and bull-headed female-first activism. (There’s a glorious symmetry in Raven trying to relaunch the legendary ‘70s feminist magazine Spare Rib, and managing to piss off the original founders so much that they wouldn’t let her use the title.) These women were allowed only a brief period in which to flourish: the ‘90s, before the backlash began and all women had to pretend to think pole-dancing was empowering. Bidisha is another one who springs to mind; and there’s Katie Puckrick (I know she’s American but she seemed to find her spiritual home here), Magenta Devine, Justine Frischmann; there will be others.

I miss those women, with their romantic souls and insane work ethics and diamond-hard heads under razor-sharp bobs. I miss seeing them sitting on chat show sofas, refusing to play along; I miss their sarcasm and their side-eye to camera and their punchy mainstream positioning; I miss the time when women like this — despite being young and glamorous — never did photoshoots in their underwear. I miss their stout-hearted allegiance to the things that they believed. I still know one or two of them in real life, but I liked knowing that Charlotte Raven was out there in the world, pissing people off and being cleverer than almost everyone else, and saying things because she thought they were true. RIP.