Mathilde Blind

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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 .
Three-quarter-length chalk drawing of Mathilde Blind by Lucy Madox Brown, 1872. Blind is seated, at a three quarter turn, her hands in her lap holding papers and her long, dark hair loose down her back. She is wearing a green dress with fur trim and an orange shawl.
"Mathilde Blind" Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Mathilde_Blind.jpg. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. This work is in the public domain.

Milestones

21 March 1841
MB was born at Mannheim in Germany, the younger of two children.
Garnett, Richard, and Mathilde Blind. “Memoir”. The Poetical Works of Mathilde Blind, edited by Arthur Symons and Arthur Symons, T. Fisher Unwin, 1900, pp. 1 - 43.
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Thesing, William B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 199. Gale Research, 1999.
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Between 1855 and 1858
MB and her schoolgirl friends at the Ladies' Institute in St John's Wood collaborated in writing poetry, a periodical, and even novels.
Thesing, William B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 199. Gale Research, 1999.
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By 18 May 1889
MB celebrated the theory of evolution in The Ascent of Man. With Other Poems; the title piece is her most ambitious poem.
It was reviewed on this date by the Manchester Examiner.
Blind, Mathilde. The Ascent of Man. Chatto and Windus, 1889.
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Blind, Mathilde. The Ascent of Man. Chatto and Windus, 1889.
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26 November 1896
MB died at 96 Belgrave Road, London.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Biography

Origins, Influences, Family

21 March 1841
MB was born at Mannheim in Germany, the younger of two children.
Garnett, Richard, and Mathilde Blind. “Memoir”. The Poetical Works of Mathilde Blind, edited by Arthur Symons and Arthur Symons, T. Fisher Unwin, 1900, pp. 1 - 43.
2
Thesing, William B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 199. Gale Research, 1999.
29