Fleurs du Travail, Fleurs Sublimes: Anna Mendelssohn's Involute Tulips

Aligning Anna Mendelssohn with the nineteenth-century, feminised genre of floral poetry, this essay traces Mendelssohn’s demarcations of tulips from 1974 to 1995. Through a series of close readings of Mendelssohn’s floral tropes, the essay identifies early preoccupations that contribute to her great poem, “Silk and Wild Tulips”, first published in 1995. For Mendelssohn, flowers stand for an inarticulable, idealised form of communication, and this thinking is consistent with that of her nineteenth-century forebears. Through its focus on Mendelssohn and flowers, the essay unearths both the thoroughness of Mendelssohn’s editorial processes, and some innately conservative strands of her thinking. A wide variety of unpublished archival materials are referenced, among them, prison diaries, photocopied pamphlet, poem manuscripts, marginalia, and typescript prose.