Miss Mathilde Blind (née Cohen) (21 March 1841–26 November 1896)

German poet and biographer. Born Mathilde Cohen, in Mannheim, Germany. She took the name, Blind in 1849 after her father's death, mother's remarriage to Karl Blind and the family's move to London. Blind published poetry under the pseudonym "Claude Lake" and was influenced by political thinking of Garibaldi and Mazzini who were visitors to the family home. For a brief time in the 1880s she lived with the painter Ford Madox Brown and his wife, Emma. Her writings include a biography of George Eliot, The Ascent of Man (1889), a poetic epic based on Darwinian theories of evolution, Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and Occident (1895). She died aged 96 at home in London and the bulk of her estate bequeathed to Newnham College, Cambridge.