Review: Mathilde Blind, Selected Fin-de-Siècle Poetry and Prose, ed. by James Diedrick (Cambridge: MHRA, 2021)

Abstract

Mathilde Blind’s writings, lectures, and intellectual interests make her a decadent and New Woman figure of the fin de siècle. Born in Mannheim, she was exiled from Germany, France, and Belgium after her stepfather Karl Blind took part in the Baden Revolution; the family settled in London, where they received visits from Giuseppe Mazzini, Karl Marx, and others. She wrote poems that criticized both the sexism of Darwinian sexual selection and the trope of the fallen woman, published in the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Dark Blue, and formed friendships with Amy Levy, Vernon Lee, Arthur Symons, Mona Caird, and other late nineteenth-century writers. Her corpus includes not only a wide range of poems – among them epic poems, dramatic monologues, and ballads – but also lectures, critical reviews, biographies, translations, and a novel.