Watts Gallery Volunteer Alan Castree explores the life and reputation of prolific writer and poet Mathilde Blind (1841-1896).

Mathilde Blind gained recognition and respect as poet, reviewer, biographer, translator and novelist but few remember her today.

Born Mathilde Cohen, in Baden, she lost her father while young and took the surname of her stepfather, Karl Blind, with whom she had a difficult relationship. His militant activism required him to seek exile and in 1851 the family settled in England. The Blind home, a hotbed of political radicalism, attracted other continental exiles such as Marx, Garibaldi and Mazzini, and was a salon for artistic talent: the Rossetti brothers, Swinburne and Madox Brown. Mathilde thus matured amid rigorous argument and debate. Mazzini was her hero, a “modern Dante”, and influence, as was Caroline Stansfield, friend of Mazzini and advocate of women’s suffrage.

Commitment to revolution led to Mathilde’s brother Ferdinand attempting to assassinate Bismarck; he failed, then took his own life in 1866, to her distress. Politically, Blind was ‘socialist’; as a feminist, she strove to raise the status of women in pursuit of their callings. She became familiar within Pre-Raphaelite circles and this essay focuses on her relations within those circles and on her works.

Blind’s character caused her problems. Angeli, daughter of William Rossetti, describes her “…as a handsome woman…with a resonant and rather disagreeable voice; self-assertive, high-minded and altogether formidable”; Richard Garnett observes that “…she could have spared herself much vexation and friction if occasionally she could have looked at the lighter side of things.” Angeli’s cousin, Ford Madox Hueffer (aka Ford), remembers her “…in her earlier years, of extreme beauty and fire”. However, when, in his teens, she sought help from him on a linguistic matter, “Miss Blind frightened me out of my life …with her Medusa head and piercing, brown eyes.”

Garnett agreed that her diction and strong accent told against her. She did not self-identify as Jewish, but William Rossetti gave credence to society prejudice, noting her “…Jewish race…” and that “…one might have expected her to speak English like a native [but] this was not the case.” Nevertheless he saw her qualities, describing her to Walt Whitman as “…a woman of singular ability and independence of mind”.

Despite social difficulties she established herself as a writer and as someone not to be ignored. At 18 she had a reader’s ticket to the British Museum and forged a friendship with staff member Garnett, who later became Keeper of Printed Books and assisted her in her compositions and research. With Garnett she found common interest in their pursuit of Shelley. He applauded her focus on independently minded women such as George Eliot (1883), Madame Roland (1886)and Marie Bashkirtseff (1888), about each of whom she published well received biographies. These works challenged accepted norms of the day on faith, gender and political order.

She published a translation of the journal of Bashkirtseff (1890), identifying her as a “proto-New Woman” who had died young, struggling to be heard but succeeding despite illness. William Gladstone admired the journal; it gained wide publicity, playing a key role in feminine struggles for self-identity. Blind herself suffered from constant illness from her thirties onwards, mainly bronchitis and later depression.

Barrett Browning’s feminist ideals in Aurora Leigh inspired her. Browning pinpoints women’s limited value in society, for example, their…

Particular worth and general missionariness,

As long as they keep quiet by the fire

And never say ‘no’ when the world says ‘ay’,

For that is fatal… ll 435-438 Book I

A regular at gatherings of the Rossetti families, she frequented the home of Madox Brown, an admirer of her writing. Brown appreciated her interest in his work and saw a kindred spirit; they shared political beliefs and the need for greater social justice. Hueffer describes their relationship as intimate, the closeness beginning after an article she wrote on Shelley in Westminster Review in 1870. William Rossetti provided a memoir and notes to this piece and considered her review of Swinburne’s Songs Before Sunrise, in Westminster Review in 1871, to be “uncommonly good”.

Spiritual rather than religious, her focus on a secular future in The Prophecy of St Oran (1881) provoked disquiet and the publisher ended its circulation. Ever a supporter of the oppressed, her visit to Scotland led to criticism of the English for the Highland clearances, in The Heather on Fire (1886). During that trip she read Darwin’s Origin of the Species, resulting in her 1889 poem, The Ascent of Man, which conveyed her love of nature and fascination with evolution, interests that had their roots in her earlier tutoring in science and philosophy from Mazzini.

Already close to Brown and his wife Emma in London, she joined them during the time that they spent in Manchester in the 1880’s during Brown’s work on the murals in Manchester Town Hall. Blind established links with German expatriates and, with Brown, strove to ease the poverty and misery of some of the city’s population.

After Emma’s death in 1890 Brown’s daughters, Lucy Rossetti and Catherine Hueffer, were disturbed by how close Brown and Blind were becoming, envisaging intention of marriage. William Rossetti expressed concern to Brown regarding the development of an unsettling family rift, stating, “the next move towards amicableness lies with Mathilde.” He had noted in June 1871 that she had been considering a proposal of marriage from the American poet, Joaquin Miller, but had recorded soon after that “…nothing distinct is really known about any such event.”

Blind never seems to have seriously contemplated marriage and there is no evidence of any intimate, sexual relationship; Thirlwell sees her as content with unconsummated love and happier in the presence of women. A closeness developed late in life with novelist Mona Caird; they spent a fortnight together in the Cotswolds in 1893. Caird, long married, was a champion of women’s rights and independence from men. Blind’s one novel, Tarantella, (1885) is, unsurprisingly, a tragic romance of frustrated love.

Her fierce individualism did alienate. Dante Rossetti mocked her in a limerick he sent to Brown in 1871. He was openly uncomplimentary regarding her voice and her work and wished “to preserve his critical independence” on the matters. Madox Brown found this intolerable and in 1881 an angry confrontation between the pair ensued when Brown sought to persuade Rossetti to change his mind. This did not affect their friendship but Rossetti, already very ill, would not change his view; he died soon afterwards.

Blind overcame opposition; she became one of the select contributors to Dark Blue magazine, notable in the history of the Pre-Raphaelite movement but which only lasted from 1871 to 1873. Contributors included both Rossetti brothers, William Morris, Swinburne and Simeon Solomon. The third of her poems in the magazine, Nocturne, brings forth similar motifs to those of two earlier poems in the magazine: Swinburne’s The End of the Month (later At a Month’s End) and Dante Rossetti’s Down Stream, in portraying imagery from nature to symbolise sexual experience, the link between love and death and the self-destructive embraces of lovers. These were popular nineteenth century themes and we see echoes of Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci and Robert Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover. Dark Blue was rich in content but its young founder, John Christian Freund, failed to match income to outgoings and fled to America to escape his creditors.

The Athenaeum magazine (1828-1921) rallied in the 1870s when its new owner, Sir Charles Dilke, sought “young bright minds”, to contribute . His appointment of Norman MacColl, as editor, led to a growth in women contributors. Blind reviewed literature in this journal from 1872-1887, became an exacting critic and excelled “…among a new generation of women poets who stood out on account of their unconventional ideas …[she was] a free thinker.”

Poems in her two collections, Dramas in Miniature (1891) and Birds of Passage (1895) address same sex desire, with the suggestion that each narrator is lesbian or bisexual, notably, Scherzo, My Lady, A White Knight and The Forest Pool.

Unsparing in dedication to her causes, she gained financial support In 1892 when she inherited a considerable sum from half-brother Max, providing independence during her final years. On her death, from cancer of the uterus, she left an endowment to Newnham College, Cambridge, to provide a scholarship for women studying language and literature; Margaret Drabble gained this scholarship in 1957 and acknowledges knowing little of Blind at the time but being pleased to rediscover her in Diedrick’s biography later. Blind bequeathed to Garnett her portrait, painted by Lucy Rossetti.

Theodore Watts-Dunton, the Athenaeum’s principal poetry reviewer, 1876-1902, wrote in 1883 that all women artists needed men for support. Most women contributors to the Athenaeum did place their careers before family, but Watts-Dunton’s attitude highlights the adversity that independent women still had to overcome, a generation after Aurora Leigh. In Blind’s obituary he described her as “highly cultured and highly endowed” but, unforgivably, always in pursuit of fame.

Edith Nesbit was tart. She saw Blind as “…a passionate soul…” but “..with too many emotions that conflicted with each other…” Whereas “…Christina Rossetti was dominated by one or two simple ideas and her poetry has left a mark on the English language it may be questioned whether that of Mathilde Blind will ever do this.”

Nesbit’s assessment, as “a passionate soul”, is an apt epitaph; despite her detractors, Blind’s passion undoubtedly contributed to furthering free expression for women.

Bibliography

Angeli, Helen Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Friends and Enemies (1949 Hamish Hamilton, London)

Armstrong, Isobel and Blain, Virginia (Eds) Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre 1830 – 1900 (1999 St. Martin’s Press, New York)

Ashton, Rosemary, Little Germany: German Refugees in Victorian Britain (1989 Oxford University Press, New York)

Blind, Mathilde (Ed. And Trans.) The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff (1890 Cassell and Company Ltd., London)

Bornand, Odette The Diary of W. M. Rossetti 1870-1873 (1977 Clarendon Press, Oxford)

Demoor, Marysa Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the ‘Athenaeum’ from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katherine Mansfield 1870 -1920 (2000 Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot)

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

Diedrick, James Mathilde Blind: Selected ‘Fin de Siecle’ Poetry and Prose (2021 The Modern Humanities Research Association, Cambridge, UK)

Garnett, Richard Memoir in Symons, Arthur (Ed.) The Poetical Works of Mathilde Blind (1900 T. Fisher Unwin, London)

Hueffer Ford Madox Ford Madox Brown: A Record of his Life and Work (1896 Longmans, Green and Company, London)

Hueffer, Ford M. Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections: Being the Memories of a Young Man (1911 Chapman and Hall Ltd., London)

McCrimmon, Barbara Richard Garnet: The Scholar as Librarian (1989 American Library Association, Chicago)

McSweeney, Kerry (Ed.) Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Aurora Leigh (1856) (1993 Oxford University Press)

Peattie, Roger W. Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti (1990 Penn State University)

Rossetti, William Michael Some Reminiscences Vol II (1906 Brown, Langham and Co., Ltd., London)

Rudy, Jason, R. Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poets (2009 Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio)

Srebrnik, Patricia, Biography (2004 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

Thirlwell, Angela Into the Frame: The Four Loves of Ford Madox Brown (2010 Chatto and Windus, London)