Definition
Mathilde Blind (1841–1896) made her name through writing in several different genres. As a poet, fiction writer, translator, biographer, editor, and critic, she put forward controversial ideas and challenged stereotypes of acceptable femininity. Blind was the child of revolutionaries and she remained committed to her socialist, feminist, anti-colonialist principles throughout her life. As her friend and biographer Richard Garnett remembers,
She was in favour of women following all callings, except the military and naval, and when invited by the present writer to consider the consequence of throwing a mass of cheap labour into occupations much overstocked, she rejoined, with decision, that the men might emigrate (Garnett 1900 18)
Blind was a signatory of the petition in support of women’s suffrage published in the Fortnightly Reviewin 1889, along with other writers including Emily Pfeiffer, Olive Schreiner, and Edith Simcox. Her work demonstrates her commitment to her...
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References
Birch, K. 2013. “Carrying her coyness to a dangerous pitch”: Mathilde Blind and Darwinian sexual selection. Women: A Cultural Review 24 (1): 71–89.
Brown, S. 2003. “A still and mute-born vision”: Locating Mathilde Blind’s reproductive poetics. In Victorian women poets, ed. A. Chapman, 123–144. Cambridge: The English Association.
Diedrick, J. 2002. “My love is a force that will force you to care”: Subversive sexuality in Mathilde Blind’s dramatic monologues. Victorian Poetry 40 (4): 359–386.
———. 2016. Mathilde Blind: Late Victorian culture and the woman of letters. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Fletcher, R.P. 2005. “Heir of all the universe”: Evolutionary epistemology in Mathilde Blind’s birds of passage: Songs of the orient and occident. Victorian Poetry 43 (4): 435–453.
Garnett, R. 1900. Memoir. In The poetical works of Mathilde Blind, ed. A. Symons, 1–43. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
Hartman, K. 1999. Ideology, identification and the construction of the feminine: Le journal de Marie Bashkirtseff. The Translator 5 (1): 61–82.
Holmes, J. 2009. Darwin’s bards: British and American poetry in the age of evolution. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Thirlwell, A. 2010. Into the frame: The four loves of ford Madox Brown. London: Chatto & Windus.
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Birch, K. (2020). Blind, Mathilde. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_126-1
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