Mathilde Blind

Mathilde Blind
Chalk portrait of Mathilde Blind by Lucy Madox Brown, 1872
Born	Mathilde Cohen (1841-03-21)21 March 1841 Mannheim, German Confederation
Died	26 November 1896(1896-11-26) (aged 55) London, UK
Resting place	St Pancras Cemetery, East Finchley, London
Occupation(s)	poet, woman of letters

Mathilde Blind (born Mathilda Cohen; 21 March 1841 – 26 November 1896),^[1] 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.^[2]