Mathilde Blind

Mathilde Blind (born Mathilda Cohen, 21 March 1841 in Mannheim, Germany, died 26 November 1896 in London), 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.