Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mathilde Blind
-
Standard Name: Blind, Mathilde
Birth Name: Mathilde Cohen
Birth Name: Mathilde Blind
Pseudonym: Claude Lake
Indexed Name: Matilda Blind
MB
was one of the leading poets of the later nineteenth century; 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. It ranges from long narrative or philosophical poems to songs and sonnets. She also wrote journalism, translation, literary criticism, biography, and a novel. Much of her work is instinct with reforming and feminist opinion, reflecting the influence of George Eliot
, George Sand
, and especially Elizabeth Barrett Browning
.
George Saintsbury
, writing in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, grouped CN
as a poet with Mathilde Blind
, Amy Levy
, and Michael Field
. He called her writing a...
Literary responses
Constance Naden
William R. Hughes
provided for the Midland Naturalist a review of this book which CN
called kind.
Hughes, William Richard et al. Constance Naden: A Memoir. Bickers and Son.
38-9
. The Woman's World (edited by Oscar Wilde
) gave the book one of its several...
A Woman's Vengeance presents a speaker who has rejected an unworthy lover and found solace in nursing. The poet's conjuring of the urban environment and its social inequities—Its million hurrying feet that beat the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Percy Bysshe Shelley
For generations PBS
appeared the quintessential image of the Romantic poet, whose work influenced such poets as Mathilde Blind
, Amy Levy
, Alice Meynell
, Sarojini Naidu
—though for some of them he was...
Literary responses
Harriet Beecher Stowe
McLeod
parried with a highly personal attack, by re-issuing his History of the Destitution in Sutherlandshire under the title Gloomy Memories in the Highlands of Scotland: Versus Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Sunny Memories; or, A...
RMW
was by this time establishing a name for herself as an poet. In 1890 Elizabeth A. Sharp
included three of her poems in Women Poets of the Victorian Era. The anthology also features...
Friends, Associates
Augusta Webster
Vernon Lee
described in a diary entry attending a housewarming party at the Websters' in Hammersmith: An enormous crush, of ill-dressed, eccentric literary pumps. I spoke to Wm Rossetti
, Watts
, Sharp
...