Date Published:

Abstract:

The poet and woman of letters Mathilde Blind (1841–1896) achieved her early fame — and notoriety — as a radical freethinker, especially as a translator and champion of David Friedrich Strauss’s The Old Faith and the New: A Confession (1873), which articulates an antitheist form of historical and scientific materialism. Her subsequent prose works — essays, reviews, and translations — confirmed this reputation. But her verse, which makes use of what her beloved poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in The Revolt of Islam called “a subtler language within language,” speaks in a subjective non-polemical voice. Focusing on the poetry Blind published in a range of Victorian periodicals, including Dark Blue, the Athenaeum, Black and White, and The Savoy, this essay argues that these poems express the tension between materialism and idealism that characterize her poetry as a whole, while also illuminating the complex dynamics of secularism in the Romantic and post-Romantic eras.

September 2024: James Diedrick, Professor Emeritus of English at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, Georgia, is the author of Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters (University of Virginia Press, 2016); editor of Mathilde Blind: Selected Fin-de-Siècle Poetry and Prose (MRHA, 2021); co-editor of Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick, Film, and the Uses of History (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); and author of Understanding Martin Amis, University of South Carolina Press (first edition, 1995; revised and expanded edition, 2004). He has published articles on Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, George Eliot, Mathilde Blind, Elizabeth Pennell, Henry Ashbee, Ring Lardner, J.G. Ballard, and Martin Amis. He is currently at work on a project analyzing affinities and convergences between Gladstonian liberalism and the New Woman movement in late-century British culture.