ABSTRACT
Mathilde Blind was a translator and literary critic as well as a poet. She was born in Mannheim, Germany, as Mathilde Cohen. Her elderly father, a Jewish banker, died soon after her birth, and her mother subsequently married the revolutionary leader Karl Blind. The family was forced to flee from Paris to England in 1849. Mathilde was educated at a London girls’ school, and later in Zurich. Here she tried unsuccessfully to gain admission to university lectures, an experience which fired her later enthusiasm for the cause of women’s education. She admired Mary Wollstonecraft, publishing an article on her in 1878, and herself lived the life of an independent woman. She never married, travelled widely in Europe and Egypt, and supplemented her private income by writing and lecturing. Although German was her native tongue, and she published translations from Goethe as well as of D. F. Strauss’s The Old Faith and the New (1873), she was fluent in other languages as well. She wrote a life of the revolutionary heroine Madame Roland (1886) and translated the extraordinary Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff (1890) with a dashing careless style that was felt to do justice to the impetuous and candid form of the original. Well educated and well read, Blind was intellectually confident as well as financially generous, and gained a wide circle of friends in the world of the arts, including Ford Madox Brown, Swinburne, the Rossettis (Dante Gabriel and William), the novelist Mona Caird, Eleanor Marx, and others. In later life she loved to give ‘literary dinners’ in the private room of some well-chosen hotel.
