BURIED TOGETHER
Partner Emma
Hill Madox Brown
Queer Places:
St Pancras Cemetery, 278 High Rd, London N2 9AG, UK
Mathilde
Blind (born Mathilda Cohen, 21 March 1841 in
Mannheim,
Germany, died 26 November 1896 in London),[1]
was a German-born English poet, fiction writer, biographer, essayist and
literary critic. In the early 1870s she emerged as a pioneering female
aesthete in a mostly male community of artists and writers, and by the late
1880s she had become a prominent voice and leader among
New Woman
writers, including
Vernon
Lee (Violet Paget),
Amy Levy,
Mona
Caird,
Olive Schreiner,
Rosamund Marriott Watson, and
Katharine Tynan. Her work was praised by
Algernon Charles Swinburne,
William Michael Rossetti,
Amy Levy,
Edith
Nesbit,
Arthur Symons and
Arnold Bennett. Her widely discussed poem The Ascent of Man
represents a distinctly feminist response to the Darwinian
theory of evolution.[2]
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 Hill’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.
Blind was born in Mannheim,
Germany, the older child of a banker named Jacob Abraham Cohen and his second
wife, born Friederike Ettlinger. She had a brother, Ferdinand, two
half-brothers (Meyer Jacob "Max" Cohen, from his father's first marriage, and
Rudolf, from the marriage of Friederike and Karl Blind), and a half-sister,
Ottilie, also from the marriage of Friederike and Karl Blind. Cohen died in
1848, the same year her mother remarried to
Karl
Blind, who was involved in the
Baden insurrection of 1848. They immigrated to London in 1852, and it was
around the time of the move that she took her stepfather's surname.[3]
In London Blind attended the Ladies' Institute,
St John's Wood, where she was a friend of future novelist
Rosa Nouchette Carey.[4]
Much of the evidence for this period in Mathilde's life is contained in a
55-page typescript in the British Library, a fragmentary story of a
precocious, rebellious girl who is expelled from the Ladies' Institute for her
freethinking, and who then travels to Switzerland for a long stay with
maternal relatives in Zurich, before embarking on an unaccompanied walking
tour through the Alps – highly unusual at that time for a single woman. The
protagonist's name in the typescript is Alma, but her experiences parallel
closely those of Blind herself, and some of the names in the Zurich section of
the narrative are those of people Mathilde actually knew in her adolescent
years.[5]
While in Switzerland she was barred as a woman from entry to lectures at
Zurich University, but spent much time in the company of revolutionary
colleagues of her mother and stepfather. She also took private lessons from
the renowned philosopher and Sanscrit scholar
Kuno
Fischer. In 1854 Fischer had begun work on his History of Modern
Philosophy: Descartes and His School, completed in 1865, which among other
things had a direct influence on
Friedrich Nietzsche. In Fischer's account of
Baruch Spinoza and his ideas, Nietzsche recognized a kindred philosophical
spirit. The two philosophers share a radical philosophy of immanence and the
negation of all transcendence, a philosophical outlook also shared by Ludwig
Feuerbach and by David Strauss, whose The Old Faith and the New: A
Confession Blind would translate 15 years after studying with Fischer. All
four thinkers, and the adult Blind, reject teleology – the idea that there is
an end goal or ultimate purpose to things. For them the immanent world, devoid
of inherent purpose, constitutes the horizon of being and the sole possible
source of value. This philosophical outlook informs all of Blind's writing,
and caused the publisher of The Prophecy of St. Oran and Other Poems,
Newman & Co., to withdraw the book from circulation. As William Michael
Rossetti wrote to
Ford Madox Brown, Newman & Co. "had got frightened by somebody about the
atheistic character of the book, and had determined to sell it no more."[6]
In 1866 Blind's brother Ferdinand failed in an attempt to assassinate
Otto von Bismarck, then chancellor of the
North German Confederation, and committed suicide in prison.[7]
He was motivated in part by his stepfather Karl Blind and other revolutionary
exiles living in London, who were outraged by the way Bismarck treated the
German states like pawns in his empire-building strategy. Many years later,
Mathilde shared with her friend
Moncure Conway the contents of a letter she had received from her brother
in the spring of 1866. She and Ferdinand had been apart since 1864, when he
left London in his 18th year to study in Germany. During his university years
he also participated in the left-wing opposition to Bismarck, and after
graduating in March 1866, during a hiking tour of Bavaria and Bohemia, he
wrote to Mathilde describing the depth of his opposition to Bismarck: "As I
wandered through the blooming fields of Germany, that were so soon to be
crushed under the iron heel of war and saw the number of youths pass by that
were to lose their lives for the selfish aims of the few, the thought came
quite spontaneously to punish the cause of so much evil, even if it were at
the cost of my life."[8]
The first, pseudonymous volume of poetry she published in the wake of
Ferdinand's death (Poems, published by Claude Lake, 1867) is dedicated
to her early mentor, the Italian revolutionary
Giuseppe Mazzini, but the poems themselves also evoke the memory of
Ferdinand. As James Diedrick remarked, the book "gains both biographical and
literary significance when viewed as a 'double-voiced' volume that
simultaneously celebrates Mazzini's victorious republicanism and obliquely
honors Ferdinand, his ghostly double, whose squandered idealism and sacrifice
haunt the margins of its pages."[9]
Blind's early political affiliations were shaped by the foreign refugees
who frequented her stepfather's house, including
Giuseppe Mazzini, for whom she entertained a passionate admiration and
about whom she would publish reminiscences in the
Fortnightly Review in 1891.[10]
Other revolutionaries who frequent her mother and stepfather's house in St.
John's Wood included
Karl Marx
and
Louis Blanc. Her early commitment to women's suffrage was influenced by
her mother's friend
Caroline Ashurst Stansfeld, who was active in the British feminist
movement from its origins in the 1840s. These radical affiliations are
manifested in Blind's politically charged poetry, and in her own unbending
commitment to reform. As Richard Garnett observed, in the society of political
refugees and radicals Blind was raised in, "admiration musts necessarily be
reserved for audacity in enterprise, fortitude in adversity... anything
breathing unconquerable defiance of the powers that were."[11]
In the early 1870s, after abandoning the male pseudonym she used for her
first volume of verse, Mathilde 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. (Garnett would remain Blind's friend and literary adviser
throughout her lifetime.) 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."[12]
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, Emma Hill.
Brown also painted Blind's portrait during this period.[14]
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.[15]
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."[16]
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), Oliver
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 his 20 July review of the volume in the
Athenaeum the journal's lead poetry reviewer Theodore
Watts-Dunton 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 Marie Bashkirtseff's Journal (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 are 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 May
22 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, where also Emma Hill and her husband are buried.[17]
My published books:
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