Mathilde Blind

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Mathilde Blind bigraphy, stories - English poet

Mathilde Blind : biography

21 March 1841 – 26 November 1896

Mathilde Blind (born Mathilde Cohen; 21 March 1841 – 26 November 1896),http://www.poemhunter.com/mathilde-blind/biography/ was a German-born British poet.

Life

Blind was born in Mannheim, Germany, the older child of a banker named Cohen and his second wife, born Friederike Ettlinger. Cohen died in Mathilde’s infancy and her mother remarried to Karl Blind, who was involved in the Baden insurrection of 1848. They fled in 1849 to London, where Mathilde took his surname.ODNB entry by Patricia Srebrnik. There she attended the Ladies’ Institute, St John’s Wood, where she was a contemporary and friend of the, then, future novelist Rosa Nouchette Carey.

Mathilde Blind was greatly influenced by 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.ODNB entry. Meanwhile at the age of 18, she travelled alone to Switzerland and maintained a fondness for the country throughout her life, reflected in an "especially cosmopolitan character" in her literary work. While there she was barred as a woman from entry to lectures at Zurich University, but she spent much time in company with revolutionaries. In 1866 her brother Ferdinand failed in an attempt to assassinate Otto von Bismarck, then chancellor of the North German Confederation, and committed suicide in prison.ODNB entry.

Her first known production was a German ode recited at Bradford for the Schiller centenary in 1859. It was followed by an English tragedy about Robespierre, which was never printed but earned praise from Louis Blanc, and by a short volume of immature poems published in 1867 under the pseudonym Claude Lake. Visits to Scotland 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". "Tarantella", a prose romance, was published in 1885 (2nd e. 1886; also Boston, 1885), but was less attuned to the tastes of her day.

In 1888, Mathilde Blind produced The Ascent of Man, an ambitious attempt at an epic based on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Her goal of dealing with the highest subjects was further shown in her translations of two contemporary European books: David Strauss’s The Old Faith and the New (1873 and 1874) and The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff (1890). It also appeared in her lives of two of the most distinguished among women of the period — George Eliot (1883; new e. 1888) and Madame Roland (1886) – for the Eminent Women Series. 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. Brown painted her during that period.Reproduced here:

Later, Blind traveled widely in Italy and Egypt. She was partly drawn there by the love of nature and antiquity and partly due to her failing health. These travels had their influence in Dramas in Miniature (1891) and Songs and Sonnets (1893), and formed the staple of Birds of Passage (1895). Her last poetical work was performed at Stratford-on-Avon, where the quiet loveliness of the Warwickshire scenery and the associations with Shakespeare inspired her to write some of her most beloved sonnets.

Blind died in London on 26 November 1896, bequeathing the greater part of her property (which had mostly come to her late in life as a legacy from a stepbrother) to Newnham College, Cambridge. She was buried in Finchley Cemetery, under a monument erected by a friend and sponsor, Dr. Louis Mond.

Assessment

There was more character in Mathilde Blind than she could quite bring out in her poetry, despite her best efforts. The consciousness of effort, indeed, is a draw-back to the enjoyment of her verse. Sometimes, however, especially in songs, sonnets, and the lyrics with which she was inspired by sympathy with the destitute and outcast classes, she achieves a perfect result. The local colouring, too, of her Scottish and many of her oriental poems is fine and true. Some of her sonnets are exceedingly impressive; she nevertheless did her powers greatest justice when her singing robes were laid aside. Her reputation would be enhanced by a judicious selection from her correspondence.

More recently she has attracted the attention of scholars specializing in women’s writing. 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 Sands and Elizabeth Barrett Browning as influences on her.Orlando site introduction to Blind. 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.Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993), pp. 374–76.