The University of Sussex Library’s Special Collections contains holdings vital to research in Modernism, including a number of internationally acclaimed archival, manuscript and rare book collections, relating to 20th-century literary, political and social history. Collections relevant to the Centre for Modernist Studies include the papers of Rudyard Kipling and a series of collections relating to the Bloomsbury Group, including the Monks House Papers of Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf, the Edith Sitwell papers, the Charleston papers and the Carrington Papers. The Mass-Observation Archive contains the papers of the social research organisation of the 1930s and 1940s and continues to collect new material in the present day.
Also refer to the Library’s Special Collections pages and the Mass Observation Archive for further information.
Also refer to the School of English postgraduate study and research environment pages for information on facilities and support.
Please also consult information available at The Centre for Life Writing
Grace Lake archive
Anna Mendelssohn (1948 - 2009), was a British poet, artist, musician, and political activist. Her publications include Implacable Art (Folio &Equipage 2000), Viola Tricolor (Equipage 1993), Bernache Nonnette (Equipage 1995), and Tondo Aquatique (Equipage 1997). Many of her books were published under the name Grace Lake.
Mendelssohn wrote and drew incessantly, particularly in the last years of her life; she died on November 15, 2009. In spring 2010, Sara Crangle got in touch with the executors of Anna Mendelssohn/Grace Lake’s estate. Anna's three children have generously agreed to donate all 34 boxes of her archival material to the University of Sussex, as well as a considerable collection of paintings and drawings.
Anna Mendelssohn remains best known for her avant-garde poetry, her abstract visual art, and for her involvement with the Angry Brigade in the early seventies. Mendelssohn was one of the defendants in the Stoke Newington Eight trial in 1972. Although she insisted on her innocence and passionately defended herself in court, she was convicted of conspiracy to cause explosions, and served five years of a ten-year sentence. After her release, she attended the universities of Essex and Cambridge and started a family.
Peter Riley describes Anna Mendelssohn's art as follows:
'Her poetry ranged widely in manner but was fundamentally ecstatic and expostulary...but also outrageously ludic in the surrealist line. She accumulated several thousand handwritten poems and probably a greater number of ink drawings...Anna's legacy, apart from a room heaped to the ceiling with books, poetry manuscripts and drawings, lies in her unique artistic temperament, beholden to no cultural dictates, fiercely reclaiming her rights as a woman and aJew, but partaking equally in art as a theatre of linguistic and visual delight' (The Guardian, 15 December, 2009)