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Mathilde Blind

January 22, 2023

Mathilde Blind (born Mathilda Cohen; 21 March 1841 in Mannheim, Germany – 26 November 1896, in London),[1] was a German-born English poet, fiction writer, biographer, essayist and critic. In the early 1870s she emerged as a pioneering female aesthete in a mostly male community of artists and writers. By the late 1880s she had become prominent among New Woman writers such as Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Amy Levy, Mona Caird, Olive Schreiner, Rosamund Marriott Watson, and Katharine Tynan. She was praised by Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, Amy Levy, Edith Nesbit, Arthur Symons and Arnold Bennett. Her much-discussed poem The Ascent of Man presents a distinctly feminist response to the Darwinian theory of evolution.[2]

Mathilde Blind
Chalk portrait of Mathilde Blind by
Lucy Madox Brown, 1872
Born
Mathilde Cohen

(1841-03-21)21 March 1841
Mannheim, German Confederation
Died26 November 1896(1896-11-26) (aged 55)
London, UK
Resting placeSt Pancras Cemetery, East Finchley, London
Occupation(s)poet, woman of letters

Early life

Blind was born in Mannheim, Germany, the older child of a banker named Jacob Abraham Cohen and his second wife, born Friederike Ettlinger. She had a brother, Ferdinand, two half-brothers (Meyer Jacob "Max" Cohen, from his father's first marriage, and Rudolf, from the marriage of Friederike and Karl Blind), and a half-sister, Ottilie, also from the marriage of Friederike and Karl Blind. Cohen died in 1848, the same year her mother remarried to Karl Blind, who was involved in the Baden insurrection of 1848. They immigrated to London in 1852, and it was around the time of the move that she took her stepfather's surname.[3]

In London, Blind attended the Ladies' Institute, St John's Wood, where she was a friend of future novelist Rosa Nouchette Carey.[4] Much of the evidence for this period in Blind's life is contained in a 55-page typescript in the British Library, a fragmentary story of a precocious, rebellious girl who is expelled from the Ladies' Institute for her freethinking, and who then travels to Switzerland for a long stay with maternal relatives in Zürich, before embarking on an unaccompanied walking tour through the Alps – highly unusual at that time for a single woman. The protagonist's name in the typescript is Alma, but her experiences parallel closely those of Blind herself, and some of the names in the Zürich section of the narrative are those of people Blind actually knew in her adolescent years.[5]

While in Switzerland she was barred as a woman from entry to lectures at the University of Zürich, but spent much time in the company of revolutionary colleagues of her mother and stepfather. She also took private lessons from the renowned philosopher and Sanscrit scholar Kuno Fischer. In 1854 Fischer had begun work on his History of Modern Philosophy: Descartes and His School, completed in 1865, which among other things had a direct influence on Friedrich Nietzsche. In Fischer's account of Baruch Spinoza and his ideas, Nietzsche recognized a kindred philosophical spirit. The two philosophers share a radical philosophy of immanence and the negation of all transcendence, a philosophical outlook also shared by Ludwig Feuerbach and by David Strauss, whose The Old Faith and the New: A Confession Blind translated 15 years after studying with Fischer. All four thinkers, and the adult Blind, reject teleology – the idea that there is an end goal or ultimate purpose to things. For them the immanent world, devoid of inherent purpose, constitutes the horizon of being and the sole possible source of value. This philosophical outlook informs all of Blind's writing, and caused the publisher of The Prophecy of St. Oran and Other Poems, Newman & Co., to withdraw the book from circulation. As William Michael Rossetti wrote to Ford Madox Brown, Newman & Co. "had got frightened by somebody about the atheistic character of the book, and had determined to sell it no more".[6]

In 1866, Blind's brother Ferdinand failed in an attempt to assassinate Otto von Bismarck, then chancellor of the North German Confederation, and committed suicide in prison.[7] He was motivated in part by his stepfather Karl Blind and other revolutionary exiles living in London, who were outraged by the way Bismarck treated the German states like pawns in his empire-building strategy. Many years later, Blind shared with her friend Moncure Conway the contents of a letter she had received from her brother in the spring of 1866. She and Ferdinand had been apart since 1864, when he left London in his 18th year to study in Germany. During his university years he also participated in the left-wing opposition to Bismarck, and after graduating in March 1866, during a hiking tour of Bavaria and Bohemia, he wrote to Blind describing the depth of his opposition to Bismarck: "As I wandered through the blooming fields of Germany, that were so soon to be crushed under the iron heel of war and saw the number of youths pass by that were to lose their lives for the selfish aims of the few, the thought came quite spontaneously to punish the cause of so much evil, even if it were at the cost of my life."[8] The first, pseudonymous volume of poetry she published in the wake of Ferdinand's death (Poems, published by Claude Lake, 1867) is dedicated to her early mentor, the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, but the poems themselves also evoke the memory of Ferdinand. As James Diedrick remarked, the book "gains both biographical and literary significance when viewed as a 'double-voiced' volume that simultaneously celebrates Mazzini's victorious republicanism and obliquely honors Ferdinand, his ghostly double, whose squandered idealism and sacrifice haunt the margins of its pages".[9]

Blind's early political affiliations were shaped by the foreign refugees who frequented her stepfather's house, including Giuseppe Mazzini, for whom she entertained a passionate admiration and about whom she would publish reminiscences in the Fortnightly Review in 1891.[10] Other revolutionaries who frequent her mother and stepfather's house in St. John's Wood included Karl Marx and Louis Blanc. Her early commitment to women's suffrage was influenced by her mother's friend Caroline Ashurst Stansfeld, who was active in the British feminist movement from its origins in the 1840s. These radical affiliations are manifested in Blind's politically charged poetry, and in her own unbending commitment to reform. As Richard Garnett observed, in the society of political refugees and radicals Blind was raised in, "admiration musts necessarily be reserved for audacity in enterprise, fortitude in adversity... anything breathing unconquerable defiance of the powers that were."[11]

Career

In the early 1870s, after abandoning the male pseudonym she used for her first volume of verse, Blind emerged as a force to be reckoned with in London's literary bohemia. In early January 1870 she delivered a lecture on Percy Bysshe Shelley at the Church of Progress in London, stressing the poet's political radicalism. In July of that year she published a review-essay on William Michael Rossetti's edition of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Westminster Review that earned the praise of Algernon Charles Swinburne and gained her entry into a formerly all-male group of "Shelleyites" that included Swinburne, Rossetti, and Richard Garnett. (Garnett would remain Blind's friend and literary adviser throughout her lifetime.) A year after this essay appeared, Blind began publishing poetry and nonfiction in Dark Blue, a new Oxford-based journal that during its short run published prose and art by many of Britain's leading Pre-Raphaelites and aesthetes. Her wide-ranging publications in this journal are those of a daring feminist aesthete: she wrote sexually subversive poems about haunted lovers, an erudite essay on Icelandic poetry, and a short story exploring the corrosive effects of class divisions on human relations. In the fall of 1872, as her association with Dark Blue was ending, she began reviewing contemporary poetry and fiction for the Athenaeum, where over the next 15 years she passed judgement on a wide range of contemporary writers, ranging from William Morris to Margaret Oliphant. At the end of 1871 she published Selections from the Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley for the Tauchnitz Collection of British Authors, containing an introductory "Memoir" of Shelley's life. In the following year, she brought out her translation of David Strauss's The Old Faith and the New: A Confession, which established her reputation as a daring freethinker, following in the footsteps of George Eliot, who had translated The Life of Jesus in 1853. The generic range of these early works (poetry, fiction, criticism, biography, translation), as well as their subject matter and themes (female autonomy and agency, anti-theism, aestheticism, the relationship of literary and political radicalism), indicates the aesthetic principles and themes that would characterize the remainder of Blind's career, while emphasizing the cosmopolitan nature of her sensibility and outlook.

Despite her diverse literary interests, Blind remained devoted to poetry, as is evident in an 1869 letter to Richard Garnett: "My only real intense life has been for a long time in writing, and when I cannot swim and float about in the enchanted waters of poetry I am like a fish out of water. I gasp and pant for want of the proper element to breathe in."[12] Blind's visits to Scotland in the 1870s and 1880s inspired two poems of considerable compass and ambition: the narrative poem "The Prophecy of St. Oran" (published in 1881, but written some years earlier) and The Heather on Fire (1886), a denunciation of the Highland clearances. Both are full of impassioned eloquence and energy, and "The Prophecy" in particular has an ample share of the quality Matthew Arnold called "Celtic magic".

As Blind's reputation as a poet began to rise in the 1880s, she undertook a number of other ambitious literary projects, including two highly praised biographies for the Eminent Women Series edited by John Henry Ingram. The first of these was also the first biography of the novelist George Eliot (1883; new edition 1888), and the second was a life of Madame Roland (1886), one of the leaders of the Girondins faction during the French Revolution. While writing the latter she lived mainly in Manchester, to be near the painter Ford Madox Brown (who was involved in decorating the town hall with frescoes) and his wife.[13] Brown also painted Blind's portrait during this period.[14] Brown and Blind were emotionally intimate from the mid-1870s until Brown's death in 1893, although this devotion caused considerable turmoil in his family.[15]

Blind's only novel, "Tarantella", a prose romance, is a remarkable work in many ways, but was neither a commercial nor a popular success. Richard Garnett wrote that "the fate of this remarkable book is one of the injustices of literature". Noting that "it has an exciting story, interesting characters, ease and naturalness of dialogue", and "is the receptacle of much of the writer's most serious thought and intense personal feeling", Garnett attributes the novel's failure to attract a wide audience to the preference for realism and the "minute analysis of character" in the mid-1880s. Tarantella, by contrast, "is very romantic, very idealistic, very eloquent, and not in the least concerned with minutiae". Garnett concludes that "now that the taste for romance has revived", Blind's novel "ought to have another chance of taking its rightful place".[16] While the novel was translated into French in 1893, and reprinted in a single-volume format the same year by T. Fisher Unwin, its coexistence alongside similarly philosophical fictions, including Vernon Lee's A Phantom Lover (1890), Oliver Schreiner's Dreams (1890), and Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1891) did not improve its fortunes.

In 1889 Blind published The Ascent of Man, whose title poem is an ambitious response to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. The poem was widely reviewed and discussed and did much to enhance Blind's reputation; in the 20 July issue of the Athenaeum the reviewer breathlessly reported that "we have known her book to be read on the Underground Railway, and the reader to be so absorbed... as to be carried unawares several stations past his destination." The importance of this poem was later reinforced by an 1899 edition with an introduction by the evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace.

In 1890 Blind was the subject of a profile in Woman, the magazine that Arnold Bennett would write for and edit in the 1890s. "A Chat With Mathilde Blind" in the "Notes on Notables" section of the 3 July issue begins by stating that "everyone familiar with the current thought and literature of the day knows the name of Mathilde Blind". The anonymous writer then praises in turn "the admirable Life of Madame Roland... certainly the most graphic and accurate picture of the great revolutionary heroine ever penned in England, or, for that matter, in France", and Tarantella, a "quaint, weird story, full of imagination and suggested thought". However, "it is as a poetess that Miss Blind has scored her greatest triumphs", the writer continues, noting that the verses in The Prophecy of St. Oran and Other Poems "made an instant mark, many of them becoming rapidly popular", and adding that "The Heather on Fire, 'The Sower', 'The Dead', and 'The Street Children's Dance' are even now being constantly reprinted wherever the English language is read and spoken throughout the world." After recording that Blind considers The Ascent of Man her magnum opus, the writer describes the sensation caused by Blind's translation of Marie Bashkirtseff's Journal (1890), "that strange laying bare of a woman's soul, only to be compared in its nude intensity to the confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Le Journal des Goncourt".

Blind travelled widely in Italy and Egypt in the early 1890s, partly drawn by the love of nature and antiquity and partly due to her failing health. The influence of these travels are manifest in Dramas in Miniature, (1891) Songs and Sonnets (1893), and especially Birds of Passage (1895). Arnold Bennett's pseudonymous review of Birds of Passage in the May 22 issue of Woman, when he was assistant editor of the magazine, indicates the quality of poetry Blind was writing just a few years before her death. "Miss Blind sings in many modes – she is probably more various than any other woman-poet in English literature", Bennett writes, "and in all her songs there is an original, intimately personal accent which one can catch, but not imprison within a paragraph." Bennett adds that Blind "excels in lyric verse", noting that many of the poems in the new volume, including "Prelude" and "A Fantasy", "are distinguished achievements, and they show, I think, a more complete technique than anything even in Dramas in Miniature. While admiring the "Songs of the Orient" in the volume, Bennett concludes that "for myself I would rather have her sing of England. Take the fine poem 'Noonday Rest', written on Hampstead Heath under the willows — 'Sometimes they lose a leaf, which, flickering slow,/Faints on the sunburnt leas.' How wonderfully [this] suggests the intolerable heat of a scorching noon! This poem is perhaps the best in the book, a book that contains nothing trivial, nothing shallow, nothing that is not poetry."

Blind died in London on 26 November 1896, bequeathing to Newnham College, Cambridge the greater part of her property, which had mostly come to her late in life as a legacy from a half-brother Meyer Jacob ("Max") Cohen.[13] She was cremated in Woking, and her ashes were later placed in a monument erected by a friend and sponsor, Ludwig Mond, and designed by Édouard Lantéri in St Pancras Cemetery.[17]

Works

  • Poems, under the pseudonym "Claude Lake" (1867)
  • "Shelley", a review of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, with notes and a memoir by W. M. Rossetti, Westminster Review (July 1870)
  • The Old Faith and the New: A Confession by David Friedrich Strauss, a translation from the German (1873; revised third edition with biographical essay on Strauss, 1874)
  • "Mary Wollstonecraft", biographical essay, New Quarterly Magazine (July 1878)
  • The Prophecy of St. Oran and Other Poems (1881)
  • George Eliot, the first biography of the novelist (1883)
  • Tarantella: A Romance (1885)
  • The Heather on Fire: A Tale of the Highland Clearances (1886)
  • Madame Roland, a biography (1886)
  • "Shelley's View of Nature Contrasted With Darwin's", a lecture (1886)
  • "Marie Bakshirtseff, The Russian Painter", a two-part biographical essay in the Woman's World (1888)
  • The Ascent of Man (1889)
  • The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, a translation from the French of the Russian-born painter's journal (1890)
  • Dramas in Miniature (1891)
  • Songs and Sonnets (1893)
  • Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and Occident (1895)
  • A Selection from the Poems of Mathilde Blind, edited by A. Symons (1897)
  • The Ascent of Man, new edition with new "Introductory Note" by the evolutionary biologist Alfred R. Wallace (1899)
  • The Poetical Works of Mathilde Blind, edited by Arthur Symons, with a memoir by Richard Garnett (1900)

Assessment

More recently Blind has attracted the attention of women's literature scholars. As one website puts it, "Her burning sense of political and social injustice runs like a unifying thread through her work. Her poetry combines great beauty of sound and image with vigorous narrative, delineation of character, emotional expressiveness, and engagement with intellectual ideas." The site mentions George Eliot, George Sand and Elizabeth Barrett Browning as her influences.[18] Isobel Armstrong, re-evaluating the longer works, notably "The Heather on Fire" and The Ascent of Man", saw in them "a gendered tradition in women's poetry of the nineteenth century". She noted that Blind, by re-configuring "a new myth of creativity and gender", demonstrated the best that this tradition could achieve in social and political analysis.[19]

References

  1. ^ "Mathilde Blind Biography - Biography of Mathilde Blind".
  2. ^ Diedrick 2016, pp. 213–218.
  3. ^ "Blind [née Cohen], Mathilde" by Patricia Srebrnik, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/2652 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
  4. ^ Charlotte Mitchell (2004). "Carey, Rosa Nouchette (1840–1909)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/32288. Retrieved 31 May 2011. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  5. ^ British Library, Add. MS 61930, ff. 1–55.
  6. ^ Rossetti 1990, p. 400.
  7. ^ ODNB entry.[full citation needed]
  8. ^ Quoted in Conway, Moncure, Autobiography (Houghton Mifflin, 1904), vol. 2, p. 68.
  9. ^ Diedrick 2016, pp. 30–31.
  10. ^ ODNB entry.[full citation needed]
  11. ^ Garnett 1900, "Memoir", p. 3.
  12. ^ Mathilde Blind ALS to Richard Garnett, 2 July 1869, Blind Correspondence, British Library, Add. MS 6129, ff. 34–35.
  13. ^ a b Garnett 1901.
  14. ^ "Mathilde Blind". the Victorian Web. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
  15. ^ Diedrick 2016, pp. 145–231.
  16. ^ Garnett 1900, "Memoir", p. 31.
  17. ^ The Standard, 2 December 1898.[full citation needed]
  18. ^ "Mathilde Blind – overview, orlando.cambridge.org. Retrieved 3 May 2013.
  19. ^ Armstrong 1993, pp. 374–376.

Sources

Further reading

External links

 
Wikiquote has quotations related to Mathilde Blind.
 
Wikisource has original works by or about:
Mathilde Blind
  •   Media related to Mathilde Blind at Wikimedia Commons
  • Works by Mathilde Blind at Project Gutenberg
  • Works by or about Mathilde Blind at Internet Archive
  • Works by Mathilde Blind at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)  
  • IU Digital Library Program. Transcript: Shelley's View of Nature Contrasted With Darwin's
  • Selected poems by Mathilde Blind
  • Works at The Victorian Women Writers Project

January 22, 2023
mathilde, blind, born, mathilda, cohen, march, 1841, mannheim, germany, november, 1896, london, german, born, english, poet, fiction, writer, biographer, essayist, critic, early, 1870s, emerged, pioneering, female, aesthete, mostly, male, community, artists, w. Mathilde Blind born Mathilda Cohen 21 March 1841 in Mannheim Germany 26 November 1896 in London 1 was a German born English poet fiction writer biographer essayist and critic In the early 1870s she emerged as a pioneering female aesthete in a mostly male community of artists and writers By the late 1880s she had become prominent among New Woman writers such as Vernon Lee Violet Paget Amy Levy Mona Caird Olive Schreiner Rosamund Marriott Watson and Katharine Tynan She was praised by Algernon Charles Swinburne William Michael Rossetti Amy Levy Edith Nesbit Arthur Symons and Arnold Bennett Her much discussed poem The Ascent of Man presents a distinctly feminist response to the Darwinian theory of evolution 2 Mathilde BlindChalk portrait of Mathilde Blind by Lucy Madox Brown 1872BornMathilde Cohen 1841 03 21 21 March 1841Mannheim German ConfederationDied26 November 1896 1896 11 26 aged 55 London UKResting placeSt Pancras Cemetery East Finchley LondonOccupation s poet woman of letters Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Works 4 Assessment 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External linksEarly life EditBlind was born in Mannheim Germany the older child of a banker named Jacob Abraham Cohen and his second wife born Friederike Ettlinger She had a brother Ferdinand two half brothers Meyer Jacob Max Cohen from his father s first marriage and Rudolf from the marriage of Friederike and Karl Blind and a half sister Ottilie also from the marriage of Friederike and Karl Blind Cohen died in 1848 the same year her mother remarried to Karl Blind who was involved in the Baden insurrection of 1848 They immigrated to London in 1852 and it was around the time of the move that she took her stepfather s surname 3 In London Blind attended the Ladies Institute St John s Wood where she was a friend of future novelist Rosa Nouchette Carey 4 Much of the evidence for this period in Blind s life is contained in a 55 page typescript in the British Library a fragmentary story of a precocious rebellious girl who is expelled from the Ladies Institute for her freethinking and who then travels to Switzerland for a long stay with maternal relatives in Zurich before embarking on an unaccompanied walking tour through the Alps highly unusual at that time for a single woman The protagonist s name in the typescript is Alma but her experiences parallel closely those of Blind herself and some of the names in the Zurich section of the narrative are those of people Blind actually knew in her adolescent years 5 While in Switzerland she was barred as a woman from entry to lectures at the University of Zurich but spent much time in the company of revolutionary colleagues of her mother and stepfather She also took private lessons from the renowned philosopher and Sanscrit scholar Kuno Fischer In 1854 Fischer had begun work on his History of Modern Philosophy Descartes and His School completed in 1865 which among other things had a direct influence on Friedrich Nietzsche In Fischer s account of Baruch Spinoza and his ideas Nietzsche recognized a kindred philosophical spirit The two philosophers share a radical philosophy of immanence and the negation of all transcendence a philosophical outlook also shared by Ludwig Feuerbach and by David Strauss whose The Old Faith and the New A Confession Blind translated 15 years after studying with Fischer All four thinkers and the adult Blind reject teleology the idea that there is an end goal or ultimate purpose to things For them the immanent world devoid of inherent purpose constitutes the horizon of being and the sole possible source of value This philosophical outlook informs all of Blind s writing and caused the publisher of The Prophecy of St Oran and Other Poems Newman amp Co to withdraw the book from circulation As William Michael Rossetti wrote to Ford Madox Brown Newman amp Co had got frightened by somebody about the atheistic character of the book and had determined to sell it no more 6 In 1866 Blind s brother Ferdinand failed in an attempt to assassinate Otto von Bismarck then chancellor of the North German Confederation and committed suicide in prison 7 He was motivated in part by his stepfather Karl Blind and other revolutionary exiles living in London who were outraged by the way Bismarck treated the German states like pawns in his empire building strategy Many years later Blind shared with her friend Moncure Conway the contents of a letter she had received from her brother in the spring of 1866 She and Ferdinand had been apart since 1864 when he left London in his 18th year to study in Germany During his university years he also participated in the left wing opposition to Bismarck and after graduating in March 1866 during a hiking tour of Bavaria and Bohemia he wrote to Blind describing the depth of his opposition to Bismarck As I wandered through the blooming fields of Germany that were so soon to be crushed under the iron heel of war and saw the number of youths pass by that were to lose their lives for the selfish aims of the few the thought came quite spontaneously to punish the cause of so much evil even if it were at the cost of my life 8 The first pseudonymous volume of poetry she published in the wake of Ferdinand s death Poems published by Claude Lake 1867 is dedicated to her early mentor the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini but the poems themselves also evoke the memory of Ferdinand As James Diedrick remarked the book gains both biographical and literary significance when viewed as a double voiced volume that simultaneously celebrates Mazzini s victorious republicanism and obliquely honors Ferdinand his ghostly double whose squandered idealism and sacrifice haunt the margins of its pages 9 Blind s early political affiliations were shaped by the foreign refugees who frequented her stepfather s house including Giuseppe Mazzini for whom she entertained a passionate admiration and about whom she would publish reminiscences in the Fortnightly Review in 1891 10 Other revolutionaries who frequent her mother and stepfather s house in St John s Wood included Karl Marx and Louis Blanc Her early commitment to women s suffrage was influenced by her mother s friend Caroline Ashurst Stansfeld who was active in the British feminist movement from its origins in the 1840s These radical affiliations are manifested in Blind s politically charged poetry and in her own unbending commitment to reform As Richard Garnett observed in the society of political refugees and radicals Blind was raised in admiration musts necessarily be reserved for audacity in enterprise fortitude in adversity anything breathing unconquerable defiance of the powers that were 11 Career EditIn the early 1870s after abandoning the male pseudonym she used for her first volume of verse Blind emerged as a force to be reckoned with in London s literary bohemia In early January 1870 she delivered a lecture on Percy Bysshe Shelley at the Church of Progress in London stressing the poet s political radicalism In July of that year she published a review essay on William Michael Rossetti s edition of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Westminster Review that earned the praise of Algernon Charles Swinburne and gained her entry into a formerly all male group of Shelleyites that included Swinburne Rossetti and Richard Garnett Garnett would remain Blind s friend and literary adviser throughout her lifetime A year after this essay appeared Blind began publishing poetry and nonfiction in Dark Blue a new Oxford based journal that during its short run published prose and art by many of Britain s leading Pre Raphaelites and aesthetes Her wide ranging publications in this journal are those of a daring feminist aesthete she wrote sexually subversive poems about haunted lovers an erudite essay on Icelandic poetry and a short story exploring the corrosive effects of class divisions on human relations In the fall of 1872 as her association with Dark Blue was ending she began reviewing contemporary poetry and fiction for the Athenaeum where over the next 15 years she passed judgement on a wide range of contemporary writers ranging from William Morris to Margaret Oliphant At the end of 1871 she published Selections from the Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley for the Tauchnitz Collection of British Authors containing an introductory Memoir of Shelley s life In the following year she brought out her translation of David Strauss s The Old Faith and the New A Confession which established her reputation as a daring freethinker following in the footsteps of George Eliot who had translated The Life of Jesus in 1853 The generic range of these early works poetry fiction criticism biography translation as well as their subject matter and themes female autonomy and agency anti theism aestheticism the relationship of literary and political radicalism indicates the aesthetic principles and themes that would characterize the remainder of Blind s career while emphasizing the cosmopolitan nature of her sensibility and outlook Despite her diverse literary interests Blind remained devoted to poetry as is evident in an 1869 letter to Richard Garnett My only real intense life has been for a long time in writing and when I cannot swim and float about in the enchanted waters of poetry I am like a fish out of water I gasp and pant for want of the proper element to breathe in 12 Blind s visits to Scotland in the 1870s and 1880s inspired two poems of considerable compass and ambition the narrative poem The Prophecy of St Oran published in 1881 but written some years earlier and The Heather on Fire 1886 a denunciation of the Highland clearances Both are full of impassioned eloquence and energy and The Prophecy in particular has an ample share of the quality Matthew Arnold called Celtic magic As Blind s reputation as a poet began to rise in the 1880s she undertook a number of other ambitious literary projects including two highly praised biographies for the Eminent Women Series edited by John Henry Ingram The first of these was also the first biography of the novelist George Eliot 1883 new edition 1888 and the second was a life of Madame Roland 1886 one of the leaders of the Girondins faction during the French Revolution While writing the latter she lived mainly in Manchester to be near the painter Ford Madox Brown who was involved in decorating the town hall with frescoes and his wife 13 Brown also painted Blind s portrait during this period 14 Brown and Blind were emotionally intimate from the mid 1870s until Brown s death in 1893 although this devotion caused considerable turmoil in his family 15 Blind s only novel Tarantella a prose romance is a remarkable work in many ways but was neither a commercial nor a popular success Richard Garnett wrote that the fate of this remarkable book is one of the injustices of literature Noting that it has an exciting story interesting characters ease and naturalness of dialogue and is the receptacle of much of the writer s most serious thought and intense personal feeling Garnett attributes the novel s failure to attract a wide audience to the preference for realism and the minute analysis of character in the mid 1880s Tarantella by contrast is very romantic very idealistic very eloquent and not in the least concerned with minutiae Garnett concludes that now that the taste for romance has revived Blind s novel ought to have another chance of taking its rightful place 16 While the novel was translated into French in 1893 and reprinted in a single volume format the same year by T Fisher Unwin its coexistence alongside similarly philosophical fictions including Vernon Lee s A Phantom Lover 1890 Oliver Schreiner s Dreams 1890 and Oscar Wilde s The Portrait of Dorian Gray 1891 did not improve its fortunes In 1889 Blind published The Ascent of Man whose title poem is an ambitious response to Charles Darwin s theory of evolution The poem was widely reviewed and discussed and did much to enhance Blind s reputation in the 20 July issue of the Athenaeum the reviewer breathlessly reported that we have known her book to be read on the Underground Railway and the reader to be so absorbed as to be carried unawares several stations past his destination The importance of this poem was later reinforced by an 1899 edition with an introduction by the evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace In 1890 Blind was the subject of a profile in Woman the magazine that Arnold Bennett would write for and edit in the 1890s A Chat With Mathilde Blind in the Notes on Notables section of the 3 July issue begins by stating that everyone familiar with the current thought and literature of the day knows the name of Mathilde Blind The anonymous writer then praises in turn the admirable Life of Madame Roland certainly the most graphic and accurate picture of the great revolutionary heroine ever penned in England or for that matter in France and Tarantella a quaint weird story full of imagination and suggested thought However it is as a poetess that Miss Blind has scored her greatest triumphs the writer continues noting that the verses in The Prophecy of St Oran and Other Poems made an instant mark many of them becoming rapidly popular and adding that The Heather on Fire The Sower The Dead and The Street Children s Dance are even now being constantly reprinted wherever the English language is read and spoken throughout the world After recording that Blind considers The Ascent of Man her magnum opus the writer describes the sensation caused by Blind s translation of Marie Bashkirtseff s Journal 1890 that strange laying bare of a woman s soul only to be compared in its nude intensity to the confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Le Journal des Goncourt Blind travelled widely in Italy and Egypt in the early 1890s partly drawn by the love of nature and antiquity and partly due to her failing health The influence of these travels are manifest in Dramas in Miniature 1891 Songs and Sonnets 1893 and especially Birds of Passage 1895 Arnold Bennett s pseudonymous review of Birds of Passage in the May 22 issue of Woman when he was assistant editor of the magazine indicates the quality of poetry Blind was writing just a few years before her death Miss Blind sings in many modes she is probably more various than any other woman poet in English literature Bennett writes and in all her songs there is an original intimately personal accent which one can catch but not imprison within a paragraph Bennett adds that Blind excels in lyric verse noting that many of the poems in the new volume including Prelude and A Fantasy are distinguished achievements and they show I think a more complete technique than anything even in Dramas in Miniature While admiring the Songs of the Orient in the volume Bennett concludes that for myself I would rather have her sing of England Take the fine poem Noonday Rest written on Hampstead Heath under the willows Sometimes they lose a leaf which flickering slow Faints on the sunburnt leas How wonderfully this suggests the intolerable heat of a scorching noon This poem is perhaps the best in the book a book that contains nothing trivial nothing shallow nothing that is not poetry Blind died in London on 26 November 1896 bequeathing to Newnham College Cambridge the greater part of her property which had mostly come to her late in life as a legacy from a half brother Meyer Jacob Max Cohen 13 She was cremated in Woking and her ashes were later placed in a monument erected by a friend and sponsor Ludwig Mond and designed by Edouard Lanteri in St Pancras Cemetery 17 Works EditPoems under the pseudonym Claude Lake 1867 Shelley a review of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley with notes and a memoir by W M Rossetti Westminster Review July 1870 The Old Faith and the New A Confession by David Friedrich Strauss a translation from the German 1873 revised third edition with biographical essay on Strauss 1874 Mary Wollstonecraft biographical essay New Quarterly Magazine July 1878 The Prophecy of St Oran and Other Poems 1881 George Eliot the first biography of the novelist 1883 Tarantella A Romance 1885 The Heather on Fire A Tale of the Highland Clearances 1886 Madame Roland a biography 1886 Shelley s View of Nature Contrasted With Darwin s a lecture 1886 Marie Bakshirtseff The Russian Painter a two part biographical essay in the Woman s World 1888 The Ascent of Man 1889 The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff a translation from the French of the Russian born painter s journal 1890 Dramas in Miniature 1891 Songs and Sonnets 1893 Birds of Passage Songs of the Orient and Occident 1895 A Selection from the Poems of Mathilde Blind edited by A Symons 1897 The Ascent of Man new edition with new Introductory Note by the evolutionary biologist Alfred R Wallace 1899 The Poetical Works of Mathilde Blind edited by Arthur Symons with a memoir by Richard Garnett 1900 Assessment EditMore recently Blind has attracted the attention of women s literature scholars As one website puts it Her burning sense of political and social injustice runs like a unifying thread through her work Her poetry combines great beauty of sound and image with vigorous narrative delineation of character emotional expressiveness and engagement with intellectual ideas The site mentions George Eliot George Sand and Elizabeth Barrett Browning as her influences 18 Isobel Armstrong re evaluating the longer works notably The Heather on Fire and The Ascent of Man saw in them a gendered tradition in women s poetry of the nineteenth century She noted that Blind by re configuring a new myth of creativity and gender demonstrated the best that this tradition could achieve in social and political analysis 19 References Edit Mathilde Blind Biography Biography of Mathilde Blind Diedrick 2016 pp 213 218 Blind nee Cohen Mathilde by Patricia Srebrnik doi 10 1093 ref odnb 2652 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Charlotte Mitchell 2004 Carey Rosa Nouchette 1840 1909 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online ed Oxford University Press doi 10 1093 ref odnb 32288 Retrieved 31 May 2011 Subscription or UK public library membership required British Library Add MS 61930 ff 1 55 Rossetti 1990 p 400 ODNB entry full citation needed Quoted in Conway Moncure Autobiography Houghton Mifflin 1904 vol 2 p 68 Diedrick 2016 pp 30 31 ODNB entry full citation needed Garnett 1900 Memoir p 3 Mathilde Blind ALS to Richard Garnett 2 July 1869 Blind Correspondence British Library Add MS 6129 ff 34 35 a b Garnett 1901 Mathilde Blind the Victorian Web Retrieved 10 March 2017 Diedrick 2016 pp 145 231 Garnett 1900 Memoir p 31 The Standard 2 December 1898 full citation needed Mathilde Blind overview orlando cambridge org Retrieved 3 May 2013 Armstrong 1993 pp 374 376 Sources Armstrong Isobel 1993 Victorian Poetry Poetry Poetics and Politics Routledge ISBN 978 0415144254 Diedrick James 2016 Mathilde Blind Late Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters University of Virginia Press Garnett Richard 1900 Memoir In Arthur Symons ed The Poetical Works of Mathilde Blind T Fisher Unwin Garnett Richard 1901 Blind Mathilde In Lee Sidney ed Dictionary of National Biography 1st supplement Vol 1 London Smith Elder amp Co Rossetti William Michael 1990 Roger W Peattie ed Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti Penn State University Press ISBN 978 0271006789Further reading EditAshton Rosemary 1989 Little Germany Exile and Asylum in Victorian England Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0192825629 Avery Simon 2000 Tantalising Glimpses The Intersecting Lives of Eleanor Marx and Mathilde Blind in Eleanor Marx 1855 1898 Life Work Contacts Ashgate Publishing ISBN 978 0754601135 Brandon Ruth 1990 The New Women and the Old Men Love Sex and the Woman Question Secker amp Warburg ISBN 978 0436067228 Demoor Marysa 2000 Their Fair Share Women Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katherine Mansfield 1870 1920 Ashgate Publishing ISBN 978 0754601180 Hughes Linda K 2007 A Club of Their Own The Literary Ladies New Women Writers and Fin de Siecle Authorship Victorian Literature and Culture vol 35 no 1 pp 233 260 doi 10 1017 S1060150307051509 S2CID 162623082 Livesey Ruth 2006 Socialism Sex and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain 1880 1914 British Academy ISBN 978 0197263983 McCrimmon Barbara 1989 Richard Garnett The Scholar as Librarian British Academy ISBN 978 0838905081 Rossetti William Michael 1977 The Diary of W M Rossetti 1870 1873 Oxford University Press ISBN 978 1876277116 Schaffer Talia 2000 The Forgotten Female Aesthetes Literary Culture in Late Victorian England University of Virginia Press ISBN 978 0813919379External links Edit Wikiquote has quotations related to Mathilde Blind Wikisource has original works by or about Mathilde Blind Media related to Mathilde Blind at Wikimedia Commons Works by Mathilde Blind at Project Gutenberg Works by or about Mathilde Blind at Internet Archive Works by Mathilde Blind at LibriVox public domain audiobooks IU Digital Library Program Transcript Shelley s View of Nature Contrasted With Darwin s Selected poems by Mathilde Blind Works at The Victorian Women Writers Project Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Mathilde Blind amp oldid 1122659194, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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