Writer.

21 March 1841 – 26 November 1896

Mathilde Blind in Bloomsbury: A tribute by Lindsay Wilhelm

Mathilde Blind’s dazzling career as a poet, novelist, critic, lecturer, and all-around polymath in many ways reflected her cosmopolitan upbringing, but it took off in the heady intellectual atmosphere of Bloomsbury. Born in 1841 in Germany and raised partly in Brussels, Blind emigrated to London—then a hotbed of political dissidence—at the age of eleven along with her mother and stepfather, exiled revolutionary Karl Blind. There, the Blinds’ bona fide radicalism endeared them to the leading freethinkers of their generation: regular visitors to their St. John’s Wood home included the Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini (to whom Blind dedicated her first volume of poetry), Karl Blind’s fellow exile and sometime ally Karl Marx, the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Michael Rossetti and his brother Dante Gabriel, and the polarising aesthetic poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, who would become an enthusiastic partisan of Blind’s work.

The Reading Room of the British Museum was a crucial site for Blind’s development as a writer. This was partly because her formal schooling, like that of most women in her milieu, was relatively limited; her education largely consisted in private tutoring and rigorous self-guided study, as well as spirited conversation with other members of London’s radical literati. Moreover, the Reading Room provided a space—what famed Bloomsburyite (and noted Reading Room sceptic) Virginia Woolf would later describe as “a room of one’s own”—for focused mental labour away from the domestic sphere, where social and housekeeping obligations invariably fell on women. As scholars James Diedrick and Susan David Bernstein attest, Blind applied for reading privileges in 1859, when she was splitting her time between London and Zurich. On her return from Switzerland in 1860, she found herself once again sharing a house with her parents, three younger siblings, and a rotating gaggle of her stepfather’s revolutionist friends: the Reading Room, Diedrick suggests, offered Blind something of a sanctuary from the tumult of her home life in the years before she moved out. Incidentally, its utility as a study space perhaps goes some way toward explaining why so many late-Victorian women writers—Renaissance historian Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), socialist activists Beatrice Webb and Eleanor Marx, the poets A. Mary F. Robinson and Amy Levy, South African novelist Olive Schreiner, etc. etc.—availed themselves of the Reading Room’s resources. To the extent that these women’s scholarly and creative pursuits challenged contemporary gender roles, the Reading Room was ground zero for the brand of 1890s feminism embodied in the ideal of the opinionated, self-reliant “New Woman.”

In Blind’s case, the Reading Room also played a central role in her formative friendship with one of its librarians, Richard Garnett. An accomplished scholar and translator in his own right, Garnett is perhaps best remembered today for his (admittedly sometimes patronizing) mentorship of the women writers who frequented the Reading Room; he would later profile many of these women, including Blind, for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Garnett and his wife also happened to live in St. John’s Wood, not far from the Blinds, and likely met Mathilde at one of her parents’ gatherings in the mid-1860s. What followed was twenty-five years of near constant correspondence, supplemented with long, stimulating discussions in the Reading Room, where Blind and Garnett bonded over their shared love for the late Romantic poet Percy Shelley. As both Diedrick and Bernstein explain, Blind’s relationship with Garnett was initially one of pupil and teacher. In his official capacity as the Reading Room’s keeper of books and later superintendent, Garnett pointed Blind to the locations of relevant materials and reminded her of Museum hours; as the more established scholar, he curated a “syllabus” of readings on subjects ranging from Shakespeare to empiricist philosophy, advised her on how to navigate the labyrinthine world of Victorian periodical publication, and commiserated with her in her professional ups and downs. The dynamics of their relationship became more manifestly egalitarian as the years went on: in their later letters, Blind pushes back on some of Garnett’s critiques and offers her own honest feedback on his creative work (Diedrick, for one, also identifies a certain erotic charge on Garnett’s side). But the Reading Room remained a constant, and the connections that Garnett helped Blind cultivate there would continue to inform her work for the rest of her career.

This is especially apparent in Blind’s critical and biographical writing. Like many in her bohemian set, Blind was passionately devoted to Shelley, whose “glowing anticipation of a better future in store for humanity”—so Blind put it—seemed to prefigure her own progressivism. In 1870, with Garnett’s encouragement and the resources available in the Reading Room, Blind delivered her first public lecture on the topic of Shelley’s poetic and political radicalism. The lecture, as Diedrick observes, “introduc[ed] her to the greater London community as a bold and independent woman of letters.” Her success at the lectern also gave her the motivation she needed to commence research on a longer essay concerning Shelley, which she eventually placed (much to Garnett’s delight) in the prestigious Westminster Review. It was to be the first of several important prose studies that Blind produced in the 1870s and 1880s, establishing her as a prominent voice in the broader conversation surrounding not only Shelley, but also the spirit of political revolt animating much of his work. 

Undoubtedly, Blind’s most ambitious prose projects were the pair of biographies she contributed to editor John H. Ingram’s “Eminent Women” series. As Bernstein points out, the series brought together many of the Reading Room regulars: Vernon Lee, for example, published an account of the Countess of Albany and the glittering salon she hosted in pre-revolutionary Paris; A. Mary F. Robinson contributed lives of the novelist Emily Brontë and fifteenth-century humanist Marguerite de Navarre. Blind, in a testament to her growing visibility as a scholar, was commissioned to produce the series’ first volume, a biography of realist novelist George Eliot. She began the project in early 1882, only two years after Eliot had died, and spent a gruelling seven months working on it. In the course of her research, she studied Eliot’s oeuvre and influences, interviewed the novelist’s friends and family, and solicited letters from her editors. Here, as with her work on Shelley, Blind also sought out Garnett’s advice on how to approach her subject—the “more you admire” her, he suggested, “the better you will write”—though by then she was confident enough to strike her own, more nuanced, tone. The resulting volume, published in 1883, was the first biography of Eliot and the longest sustained analysis of her work to-date. Together with Madame Roland (1886), Blind’s George Eliot cemented her place as a leading cultural critic, and she would go on to publish dozens of articles and reviews in the next decade.

But Blind’s reputation today is dominated by her poetry, and while that body of work is less clearly indebted to her experiences in Bloomsbury, it would be remiss of me not to mention it briefly here. As a poet, she’s most closely aligned with aestheticism: a movement, summed up in the phrase “art for art’s sake,” that celebrated the inherent value of artistic form apart from its moral or practical uses. Blind might have been less notorious than other adherents of aestheticism—Algernon Charles Swinburne and Oscar Wilde come to mind—but she nonetheless staked claim to the same transgressive subject matter as her more controversial male colleagues. Her early ballad “The Song of the Willi” (1871), published in the short-lived but influential Pre-Raphaelite magazine the Dark Blue, explores female sexual desire through the lens of a Hungarian folktale about dead virgins; her late collection Dramas in Miniature (1891) depicts sex work, adultery, erotic religious ecstasy, and obsessive love with a frank confidence that seems to have made reviewers—men especially—rather anxious. Perhaps most compellingly for us moderns, her provocative poetry was of a piece with her unconventional life. A fearless world traveller, serious scholar, and outspoken commentator in a time when women were expected to be none of these things, surrounded by admirers but never married, Blind looked forward to a “better future” when the liberated New Woman might not seem so new—and by the time of her death in 1896, she had done a great deal to bring that future about.

Lindsay Wilhelm is an Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University. Her research and teaching interests include aestheticism and decadence, literature and science, the Victorian Pacific, and popular literature. Her book on the Aesthetic (or “art for art’s sake”) Movement and post-Darwinian science is under contract at Cambridge University Press, and her chapter on Hawaiian dandyism is forthcoming in the Cambridge volume Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s, edited by Kristin Mahoney and Dustin Friedman.

Further reading

Susan David Bernstein, Roomscape: Women Writers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh University Press, 2013)

Mathilde Blind, Dramas in Miniature (Chatto & Windus, 1891)

—. The Poetical Works of Mathilde Blind, edited by Arthur Symons, with an introduction by Richard Garnett (T. Fisher Unwin, 1900)

—. “Shelley’s View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin’s” (Private printing, 1886)

James Diedrick, Mathilde Blind: Late Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters (University of Virginia Press, 2016)

Ana Parejo Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

My Lady by Mathilde

Like putting forth upon a sea
On which the moonbeams shimmer,
Where reefs and unknown perils be
To wreck, yea, wreck one utterly,
It were to love you, lady fair,
In whose black braids of billowy hair
The misty moonstones glimmer.

Oh, misty moonstone-coloured eye,
Latticed behind long lashes,
Within whose clouded orbs there lies,
Like lightning in the sleeping skies,
A spark to kindle and ignite,
And set a fire of love alight
To burn one’s heart to ashes.

I will not put forth on this deep
Of perilous emotion;
No, though your hands be soft as sleep,
They shall not have my heart to keep,
Nor draw it to your fatal sphere.
Lady, you are as much to fear
As is the fickle ocean.

Read by Julia Pascal