#mathilde blind

Katie Eleanor, “A New Prosperine”

from the series ‘We Met as Strangers’

Reapers

Sun-tanned men and women, toiling there together; six I count in all, in yon field of wheat, Where the rich ripe ears in the harvest weather Glow an orange gold through the sweltering heat.

Busy life is still, sunk in brooding leisure: Birds have hushed their singing in the hushed tree-tops; Not a single cloud mars the flawless azure; Not a shadow moves o'er the moveless crops;

In the glassy shallows, that no breath is creasing, Chestnut-coloured cows in the rushes dank Stand like cows of bronze, save when they flick the teasing Flies with switch of tail from each quivering flank.

Mathilde Blind by Lucy Madox Brown, 1872

Mathilde Blind (born Mathilda Cohen; 21 March 1841 – 26 November 1896), was a German-born English poet, fiction writer, biographer, essayist and critic. In the early 1870s she emerged as a pioneering female aesthete in a mostly male community of artists and writers. By the late 1880s she had become prominent among New Woman writers such as Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Amy Levy, Mona Caird, Olive Schreiner, Rosamund Marriott Watson, and Katharine Tynan. She was praised by Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, Amy Levy, Edith Nesbit, Arthur Symons and Arnold Bennett. Her much-discussed poem The Ascent of Man presents a distinctly feminist response to the Darwinian theory of evolution.

Renowned writer and leader of the New Women, Mathilde Blind, passed away on this day in 1896. She is most well-known for her pioneering feminist literature such as the poem The Ascent of Man, written as a woman’s response to Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Mathilde Blind photographed circa 1870 (x).

Mathilde Blind was born on March 21, 1841 in Mannheim, Germany. Her father was a banker named Jacob Abraham Cohen and she was his oldest child of three. After her father died in 1848 and her mother remarried the famous political writer Karl Blind, Mathilde and her brothers changed their surname to Blind. The family moved to London around this same time and Mathilde began attending St. John’s Wood Ladies' Institute. Throughout her adolescence, her mother and stepfather kept the company of leftist revolutionaries such as Karl Marx and Louis Blanc, and therefore, Mathilde herself began to develop a radical political perspective from an early age.

At the beginning of her literary career, Mathilde used a male pseudonym, but she abandoned it for her real name in the 1870s. It was this act that launched her to feminist icon status and made her one of the premier figures of London’s bohemian literary scene. She wrote over 15 texts throughout her lifetime; her only fiction novel was a romance titled Tarantula that saw little success, while her masterwork is largely considered to be the 1889 poem The Ascent of Man. The majority of Mathilde’s work dealt with the Victorian gender system and took on a feminist slant. 

She never married during her lifetime and often publicly criticized the institution of marriage. It is common belief that Mathilde was a lesbian due to her prioritization of women in her life and her association with many lesbian figures of her day such as Olive Schreiner and Violet Paget. She lived with the famous painter Ford Madox Brown for over 20 years until his wife Emma’s death and it is often believed that Mathilde and Emma were romantically involved. Mathilde Blind would eventually pass away on November 26, 1896 from uterine cancer. Her property was given to Newnham College, Cambridge per her request and she left the English literary world with a lifetime of progressive writings and political work.

Reapers

Sun-tanned men and women, toiling there together; six I count in all, in yon field of wheat, Where the rich ripe ears in the harvest weather Glow an orange gold through the sweltering heat.

Busy life is still, sunk in brooding leisure: Birds have hushed their singing in the hushed tree-tops; Not a single cloud mars the flawless azure; Not a shadow moves o'er the moveless crops;

In the glassy shallows, that no breath is creasing, Chestnut-coloured cows in the rushes dank Stand like cows of bronze, save when they flick the teasing Flies with switch of tail from each quivering flank.