Professor Sara Crangle

A Sussex English academic has produced the first replete collection of poems by Anna Mendelssohn published or prepared for circulation. 

Professor Sara Crangle’s book I'm Working Here: The Collected Poems of Anna Mendelssohn, has been recently published by Shearsman Books and will be launched at special online event on Saturday 20 March.

In theme and style, Mendelssohn’s poems draw on an expansive, post-1850 avant-garde lineage that includes Baudelaire, Stein, Akhmatova, Hikmet, Lorca, and Raworth. Attuned to the fraught legacy of the female vanguard writer, as well as to disparities of class and race, Mendelssohn’s poems are charged, acute, and probing. Her work explored feminist ideology, themes of loss, love and violence, experience of nature and radical left-wing political thought. Her art was also innovative, taking inspiration from Cubo-surrealism.

Sara was instrumental in bringing the Anna Mendelssohn archive into the University's Special Collections archive housed at The Keep, and worked to make it available to a wider audience. This archive has the highest volume of visitors of any archive in Sussex Special Collections. The cataloguing took place in 2014-2015, and was partly funded by the Sussex Research Development Fund.

Speaking about the book and the writing process, Sara said “It is wonderful to have the book out in the world at last, as many of Mendelssohn's poems were published in avant-garde, ephemeral, and hard-to-access journals. So many people have made this book a possibility, not least of all Mendelssohn's children, who generously donated her archive to Sussex, as well as Jane Harvell and Fiona Courage, who wholeheartedly supported this acquisition. Parts of the editing process were aided and abetted by Sussex Junior Research Associates Sinead Rawson and George Clutterbuck, alongside an International Junior Research Associate from the University of Chicago, Soulet Ali”.

Dr Rod Mengham, Reader in Modern English at the University of Cambridge who will be taking part in the online launch said "Sara Crangle’s editorial work is eye-popping in scale and consistently revelatory. In short, this is nothing less than a landmark in publishing history, an important document of the times, and a major work of scholarship."

To celebrate the launch of the book, an online event is being held on Saturday 20 March from 7 – 9 pm. Sara will introduce guests to Anna Mendelssohn's life and poetry and the story of the book, followed by a series of brief readings from, and in response to, Mendelssohn's work from an international line up of poets and academics.

Sara continues “Two hundred people have already signed up to attend the launch, a number speaking to the resonance of Mendelssohn's writing and legacy”.

The event is free but registration is required. If you have capacity to make a small financial contribution please consider Children Heard and Seen, a charity supporting children affected by parental imprisonment.

Register for the event