Incarceration in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn - (Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics) by Eleanor Careless (Hardcover)

About the Book

A significant study of the poet, artist and activist Anna Mendelssohn (1948-2009), this book establishes her as one of the most important avant-garde British poets of her generation and explores her contribution to the powerful tradition of women writing enclosure and escape.

Book Synopsis

Shortlisted for the University English Book Prize 2026

The first full-length study of the poet, artist and activist Anna Mendelssohn (1948-2009), this book consolidates Mendelssohn's reputation as one of the most important avant-garde British poets of her generation and explores her contribution to the powerful tradition of women writing enclosure and escape.

Mendelssohn was herself incarcerated in Holloway women's prison between 1971-76, and her bold and inventive poetry foregrounds and subverts, but does not triumphantly overcome, conditions of constraint. Informed by extensive original archival research, this book reads her highly experimental lyric alongside the poetry of her forerunners and contemporaries, including Nancy Cunard, Muriel Rukeyser and Denise Riley, restoring to view a lost network of radical, Jewish and feminist modernism. With chapters on the poetry of the Spanish Civil War, the legacy of the Holocaust, the Women's Liberation Movement, the transformation of HMP Holloway in the 1970s and prison abolitionism, Incarceration in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn illuminates the historical, political and literary contexts that shape this work and argues that Mendelssohn advances a poetics not of emancipation, but of abolition.

Review Quotes

"Eleanor Careless provides a valuable contribution to scholarship of a neglected but extremely important poet and cultural figure. It is required reading." --David Grundy, Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

"...a compelling and intellectually ambitious archival study that reaches well beyond a single-author recovery project...This superbly achieved historical and theoretical discussion and often very moving account of Mendelssohn's life and oeuvre is also timely, in conversation with scholar-activist debates on the enduring legacies of and resistance to fascism, the power of the archive, and abolitionism. " --University English book prize shortlist 2026

"...a scrupulous and expansive perspective...Careless's study stands as a far-reaching,
meticulous and compelling example to follow." --George Clutterbuck, Critical Quarterly

About the Author

Eleanor Careless is a Research Fellow at Northumbria University, UK.