ABSTRACT
Born in Mannheim, Germany, Mathilde Blind was the daughter of a Jewish banker named Cohen. She adopted the name of her mother’s second husband, Karl Blind, a well-known political activist, who was exiled from Germany after the 1848 revolution. The Ascent of Man, the ideas of David Friedrich Strauss, whose The Old Faith and the New Mathilde Blind translated in 1873, and the poetry of Shelley. An ardent activist for women’s rights, she never married, and left her estate to Newnham College, Cambridge, recently founded for women’s education, to establish a Scholarship in English Language and Literature. Blinds involvement in the emerging women’s movement of the late nineteenth century is evident in her essay on Wollstonecraft.
