Mathilde Blind: Selected Fin-de-Siècle Poetry and Prose - Victorian Literature Collection for Book Lovers & English Literature Students
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SKU:48986232
Product Description
Mathilde Blind's contributions to the New Woman and Decadent movements in the 1880s and 1890s placed her at the centre of fin-de-siècle literary culture. She rose to prominence in the early 1870s, both as an expert on and proponent of the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and as one of the few women writers published in the Dark Blue (1871-73), an influential journal that featured the work of Britain's leading Pre-Raphaelites and aesthetes. By the late 1880s, she had established close associations with key figures of England's emergent Decadent communities, from Vernon Lee and Rosamund Marriott Watson to Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons. When her Dramas in Miniature appeared in 1891, she was fusing aestheticism and Decadence so distinctively in her poetry that Symons evoked Charles Baudelaire in calling the dramatic monologues in the volume 'flowers of evil'. Her career thus highlights the connections between mid-Victorian aestheticism and late-century Decadence. It also serves as an important corrective to the male-focused narratives that long dominated accounts of these movements. In addition, and because Blind was born in Germany of Jewish parents and part of a community of exiled European radicals, her poetry and prose alike are characterized by a transnational, cosmopolitan outlook that ranges across national borders and consistently engages with Continental writers and ideas.This new edition for the first time brings together the three major volumes of poetry Blind published between 1889 and 1895 alongside a critical introduction and explanatory notes. Because she was also an active reviewer and essayist throughout her career, it includes a selection of her reviews as well as her essay 'Shelley's View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin's', which serves as an important supplement to her 1889 volume The Ascent of Man. The edition also features a selection of critical responses to Blind's writing by leading late-Victorian poets and critics.
Customer Reviews
For her sonorous poetry; progressive "New Woman" feminism; and wide-ranging affinities for Shelley, Darwin, Shakespeare, George Eliot, and Swinburne, the German-born English poet and critic Mathilde Blind (1841-96) was long overdue for fresh attention. No one has done more to advance that cause than James Diedrick, first with his excellent 2017 biography ("Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters") and now in this smartly edited collection of her poetry and prose. Verses from her three collections affirm "the cosmopolitan nature of her sensibility and outlook," as Diedrick puts it in his Introduction. The Darwin-inflected "The Ascent of Man" is a feminist epic, with its quest for "Still new vistas of new stars." Poems from "Dramas in Miniature" range from propulsive narratives ("The Mystic's Vision," "A Carnival Episode") to fervid lyrics: "Your beauty's consecrating beams/Lay mirrored in my heart all night." Blind's travels to Egypt and elsewhere perfume "Birds of Paradise: Songs of the Orient and Occident." Selections from Blind's prose and contemporary reviews of her poetry fill out this fine volume. Any reader with a settled view of the era's literature will find an enlarging new vision in the fin-de-siecle works of Mathilde Blind, a border-crossing figure who highlights, as Diedrick writes, "the connections between mid-Victorian aestheticism and late-century Decadence."
