Shelley

1887 · 146191 — London: Walter Scott 1887. First edition presentation copy inscribed by the author to a fellow poet Shelley critic and literary biographer "To Mathilde Blind. With the admiration & affection of her friend William Sharp. Oct 27 '87". Blind was a recognized authority on poetry among her contemporaries lecturing on Shelley and editing A Selection from the Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley 1872. Blind 1841-1896 who wrote the first biography of George Eliot in 1883 was widely read and praised in Britain and America for her epic poem The Ascent of Man 1889 a feminist response to Darwin. She was a prominent voice in the New Woman movement a feminist ideal of the late 19th century that included figures such as Vernon Lee Amy Levy and Olive Schreiner. Like Shelley Blind's "burning sense of political and social injustice runs like a unifying thread through her work" Orlando. Blind's literary and political careers paralleled that of her close friend William Sharp 1855-1905 who later wrote her eulogy. A women's rights activist Sharp published under the pseudonym Fiona Macleod from 1893 but his erstwhile friend William Butler Yeats likely sensed Macleod's true identity. "The production of the female persona of Fiona seems to have caused Sharp frequent ill health culminating in a near total breakdown in 1897-8; moreover he had a feeling of being haunted by past lives" ODNB. Octavo. Original blue cloth spine lettered in gilt top edge gilt others uncut. Bookplate of R. G. E. Sandbach on front pastedown. Spine slightly cocked and rubbed minor rubbing to covers couple of small marks to front cover faint foxing to endpapers and a couple of margins else bright. A very good copy. hardcover