Mathilde Blind

A British poet, critic, novelist, and essayist who gained prominence in the 1880s for her daring feminist, atheist, and democratic ideals, incisive literary criticism, and sophisticated poetry of ideas, Blind was born in Mannheim as Mathilde Cohen to Jacob Abraham Cohen, a merchant and financier, and to Friederike Cohen (Ettlinger). Blind spent her adolescence in London with her mother and stepfather Karl Blind, a radical republican who had participated in the Revolution of 1848 and continued to associate with pan-European republican circles, including Karl Marx, the pioneering feminist Caroline Ashurst Stanfield, and the great Italian republican activist-intellectual Giuseppe Mazzini. Blind asserted feminist, radical republican, and freethinking ideals from her adolescence, leaving (or being expelled from) a “ladies’ institute” to travel through Switzerland on her own at age seventeen and pursuing her educational path with mentors like the free-thinking Swiss philosopher-philologist Kuno Fischer and, back in London, with Mazzini, whose thought and experiences were central to her first book of poetry, Poems (1867, pseudonymous). In the 1870s, Blind began to publish poetry and critical essays under her own name and quickly established herself in avant-garde British literary circles and journals of the time, like Dark Blue and Atheneum. Claiming the mantle of aesthetic and political radicalism associated with Shelley, her work fused erudition, formal power, sensitive treatments of the natural and inner world, and multiform political and intellectual radicalism. Her “The Ascent of Man” articulated a complex feminist perspective on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and was viewed by many, including Blind, as her crowning work.