a life of Madame Roland (1886), one of the leaders of the Girondins faction during the French Revolution. While writing the latter she lived mainly in Manchester, to be near the painter Ford Madox Brown (who was involved in decorating the town hall with frescoes) and his wife. Brown also painted Blind's portrait during this period. Brown and Blind were emotionally intimate from the mid-1870s until Brown's death in 1893, although this devotion caused considerable turmoil in his family. Blind's only novel, "Tarantella", a prose romance, is a remarkable work in many ways, but was neither a commercial nor a popular success. Richard Garnett wrote that "the fate of this remarkable book is one of the injustices of literature". Noting that "it has an exciting story, interesting characters, ease and naturalness of dialogue", and "is the receptacle of much of the writer's most serious thought and intense personal feeling", Garnett attributes the novel's failure to attract a wide audience to the preference for realism and the "minute analysis of character" in the mid-1880s. Tarantella, by contrast, "is very romantic, very idealistic, very eloquent, and not in the least concerned with minutiae". Garnett concludes that "now that the taste for romance has revived", Blind's novel "ought to have another chance of taking its rightful place". While the novel was translated into French in 1893, and reprinted in a single-volume format the same year by T. Fisher Unwin, its coexistence alongside similarly philosophical fictions, including Vernon Lee's A Phantom Lover (1890), Oliver Schreiner's Dreams (1890), and Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1891) did not improve its fortunes. In 1889 Blind published The Ascent of Man, whose title poem is an ambitious response to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. The poem was widely reviewed and discussed and did much to enhance Blind's reputation; in the 20 July issue of the Athenaeum the reviewer breathlessly reported that "we have known her book to be read on the Underground Railway, and the reader to be so absorbed... as to be carried unawares several stations past his destination." The importance of this poem was later reinforced by an 1899 edition with an introduction by the evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace. In 1890 Blind was the subject of a profile in Woman, the magazine that Arnold Bennett would write for and edit in the 1890s. "A Chat With Mathilde Blind" in the "Notes on Notables"