In the early 1870s, after abandoning the male pseudonym she used for her first volume of verse, Blind emerged as a force to be reckoned with in London's literary bohemia. In early January 1870 she delivered a lecture on
Percy Bysshe Shelley at the Church of Progress in London, stressing the poet's political radicalism. In July of that year she published a review-essay on
William Michael Rossetti's edition of
The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in
The Westminster Review that earned the praise of
Algernon Charles Swinburne and gained her entry into a formerly all-male group of "Shelleyites" that included Swinburne, Rossetti, and Richard Garnett, a man who would remain Blind's friend and literary adviser throughout her life. A year after this essay appeared, Blind began publishing poetry and nonfiction in
Dark Blue, a new Oxford-based journal that during its short run published prose and art by many of Britain's leading Pre-Raphaelites and aesthetes. Her wide-ranging publications in this journal are those of a daring feminist aesthete: she wrote sexually subversive poems about haunted lovers, an erudite essay on Icelandic poetry, and a short story exploring the corrosive effects of class divisions on human relations. In the fall of 1872, as her association with
Dark Blue was ending, she began reviewing contemporary poetry and fiction for the
Athenaeum, where over the next 15 years she passed judgement on a wide range of contemporary writers, ranging from
William Morris to
Margaret Oliphant. At the end of 1871 she published
Selections from the Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley for the Tauchnitz Collection of British Authors, containing an introductory "Memoir" of Shelley's life. In the following year, she brought out her translation of
David Strauss's
The Old Faith and the New: A Confession, which established her reputation as a daring freethinker, following in the footsteps of George Eliot, who had translated
The Life of Jesus in 1853. The generic range of these early works (poetry, fiction, criticism, biography, translation), as well as their subject matter and themes (female autonomy and agency, anti-theism, aestheticism, the relationship of literary and political radicalism), indicates the aesthetic principles and themes that would characterize the remainder of Blind's career, while emphasizing the cosmopolitan nature of her sensibility and outlook. Despite her diverse literary interests, Blind remained devoted to poetry, as is evident in an 1869 letter to Richard Garnett: "My only real intense life has been for a long time in writing, and when I cannot swim and float about in the enchanted waters of poetry I am like a fish out of water. I gasp and pant for want of the proper element to breathe in." Blind's visits to Scotland in the 1870s and 1880s inspired two poems of considerable compass and ambition: the narrative poem "The Prophecy of St. Oran" (published in 1881, but written some years earlier) and
The Heather on Fire (1886), a denunciation of the
Highland clearances. Both are full of impassioned eloquence and energy, and "The Prophecy" in particular has an ample share of the quality
Matthew Arnold called "Celtic magic". As Blind's reputation as a poet began to rise in the 1880s, she undertook a number of other ambitious literary projects, including two highly praised biographies for the Eminent Women Series edited by
John Henry Ingram. The first of these was also the first biography of the novelist
George Eliot (1883; new edition 1888), and the second was a life of
Madame Roland (1886), one of the leaders of the
Girondins faction during the
French Revolution. While writing the latter she lived mainly in
Manchester, to be near the painter
Ford Madox Brown (who was involved in decorating the town hall with
frescoes) and his wife. Brown also painted Blind's portrait during this period. Brown and Blind were emotionally intimate from the mid-1870s until Brown's death in 1893, although this devotion caused considerable turmoil in his family. Blind's only novel,
Tarantella, a prose romance, is a remarkable work in many ways, but was neither a commercial nor a popular success.
Richard Garnett wrote that "the fate of this remarkable book is one of the injustices of literature." Noting that "it has an exciting story, interesting characters, ease and naturalness of dialogue," and "is the receptacle of much of the writer's most serious thought and intense personal feeling," Garnett attributes the novel's failure to attract a wide audience to the preference for realism and the "minute analysis of character" in the mid-1880s.
Tarantella, by contrast, "is very romantic, very idealistic, very eloquent, and not in the least concerned with minutiae." Garnett concludes that "now that the taste for romance has revived," Blind's novel "ought to have another chance of taking its rightful place." While the novel was translated into French in 1893, and reprinted in a single-volume format the same year by
T. Fisher Unwin, its coexistence alongside similarly philosophical fictions, including Vernon Lee's
A Phantom Lover (1890), Olive Schreiner's
Dreams (1890), and
Oscar Wilde's
The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1891), did not improve its fortunes. In 1889, Blind published
The Ascent of Man, whose title poem is an ambitious response to
Charles Darwin's
theory of evolution. The poem was widely reviewed and discussed and did much to enhance Blind's reputation; in the 20 July issue of the
Athenaeum the reviewer breathlessly reported that "we have known her book to be read on the Underground Railway, and the reader to be so absorbed... as to be carried unawares several stations past his destination." The importance of this poem was later reinforced by an 1899 edition with an introduction by the evolutionary biologist
Alfred Russel Wallace. In 1890, Blind was the subject of a profile in
Woman, the magazine that
Arnold Bennett would write for and edit in the 1890s. "A Chat With Mathilde Blind" in the "Notes on Notables" section of the 3 July issue begins by stating that "everyone familiar with the current thought and literature of the day knows the name of Mathilde Blind." The anonymous writer then praises in turn "the admirable Life of Madame Roland... certainly the most graphic and accurate picture of the great revolutionary heroine ever penned in England, or, for that matter, in France," and Tarantella, a "quaint, weird story, full of imagination and suggested thought." However, "it is as a poetess that Miss Blind has scored her greatest triumphs," the writer continues, noting that the verses in
The Prophecy of St. Oran and Other Poems "made an instant mark, many of them becoming rapidly popular," and adding that "
The Heather on Fire, 'The Sower', 'The Dead', and 'The Street Children's Dance' are even now being constantly reprinted wherever the English language is read and spoken throughout the world." After recording that Blind considers
The Ascent of Man her
magnum opus, the writer describes the sensation caused by Blind's translation of
The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff (1890), "that strange laying bare of a woman's soul, only to be compared in its nude intensity to the confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau and
Le Journal des Goncourt." Blind travelled widely in Italy and Egypt in the early 1890s, partly drawn by the love of nature and
antiquity and partly due to her failing health. The influence of these travels is manifest in
Dramas in Miniature (1891),
Songs and Sonnets (1893), and especially
Birds of Passage (1895).
Arnold Bennett's pseudonymous review of
Birds of Passage in the 22 May issue of
Woman, when he was assistant editor of the magazine, indicates the quality of poetry Blind was writing just a few years before her death. "Miss Blind sings in many modes—she is probably more various than any other woman-poet in English literature," Bennett writes, "and in all her songs there is an original, intimately personal accent which one can catch, but not imprison within a paragraph." Bennett adds that Blind "excels in lyric verse," noting that many of the poems in the new volume, including "Prelude" and "A Fantasy", "are distinguished achievements, and they show, I think, a more complete technique than anything even in
Dramas in Miniature. While admiring the "Songs of the Orient" in the volume, Bennett concludes that "for myself I would rather have her sing of England. Take the fine poem 'Noonday Rest', written on
Hampstead Heath under the willows—'Sometimes they lose a leaf, which, flickering slow,/Faints on the sunburnt leas.' How wonderfully [this] suggests the intolerable heat of a scorching noon! This poem is perhaps the best in the book, a book that contains nothing trivial, nothing shallow, nothing that is not poetry." Blind died in London on 26 November 1896, bequeathing to
Newnham College, Cambridge, the greater part of her property, which had mostly come to her late in life as a legacy from a half-brother Meyer Jacob ("Max") Cohen. She was cremated in
Woking, and her ashes were later placed in a monument erected by a friend and sponsor,
Ludwig Mond, and designed by
Édouard Lantéri in
St Pancras Cemetery. ==Works==