Mathilde Blind's career as an English poet and woman of letters is best understood in the context of the European revolutions of 1848, which brought her and her family to England in 1852 as permanent political exiles when she was nine years old. Her own fervently idealistic, politically engaged poetry, which germinated in the rich soil of her stepfather's radical engagements, was nurtured by the expatriate community that formed around his and his wife's home in west London. Blind's ardent feminism, nationalism, and religious skepticism developed distinctively English coloration, but they were rooted in the cosmopolitan experiences that initially nourished them.

Blind was born Mathilde Cohen in Manheim, Germany. She was the second of two children born to an elderly retired banker, who died in Blind's infancy. In 1847 her mother, Friederike Ettlinger, became involved with the movement for a united and democratic Germany and in 1849 married Karl Blind, a radical...