Mathilde Blind was born in Mannheim in 1841. After the death of her father, her mother married Karl Blind; his involvement in revolutionary politics caused the family to flee to England in 1848. She mixed in left-wing, radical circles throughout her life, maintaining friendships with Garibaldi and Mazzini, and was a close friend of Eleanor Marx and other women involved in the feminist movement, as well as with writers and artists of the Pre-Raphaelite group. She spent some time living in Manchester with the family of Ford Madox Brown. A translator of several radical European books, she also wrote the first biography of George Eliot (1883). Among other works, she published two long poems, The Heather on Fire (1886), about the Highland Clearances, and The Ascent of Man (1888), an account of evolution, as well as shorter verses, later collected by Arthur Symons in her Complete Poetical Works (1900). She died in 1896, leaving her estate to Newnham College, Cambridge.