she wrote sexually subversive poems about haunted lovers, an erudite essay on Icelandic poetry, and a short story exploring the corrosive effects of class divisions on human relations. In the fall of 1872, as her association with Dark Blue was ending, she began reviewing contemporary poetry and fiction for the Athenaeum, where over the next 15 years she passed judgement on a wide range of contemporary writers, ranging from William Morris to Margaret Oliphant. At the end of 1871 she published Selections from the Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley for the Tauchnitz Collection of British Authors, containing an introductory "Memoir" of Shelley's life. In the following year, she brought out her translation of David Strauss's The Old Faith and the New: A Confession, which established her reputation as a daring freethinker, following in the footsteps of George Eliot, who had translated The Life of Jesus in 1853. The generic range of these early works (poetry, fiction, criticism, biography, translation), as well as their subject matter and themes (female autonomy and agency, anti-theism, aestheticism, the relationship of literary and political radicalism), indicates the aesthetic principles and themes that would characterize the remainder of Blind's career, while emphasizing the cosmopolitan nature of her sensibility and outlook. Despite her diverse literary interests, Blind remained devoted to poetry, as is evident in an 1869 letter to Richard Garnett: "My only real intense life has been for a long time in writing, and when I cannot swim and float about in the enchanted waters of poetry I am like a fish out of water. I gasp and pant for want of the proper element to breathe in." Blind's visits to Scotland in the 1870s and 1880s inspired two poems of considerable compass and ambition: the narrative poem "The Prophecy of St. Oran" (published in 1881, but written some years earlier) and The Heather on Fire (1886), a denunciation of the Highland clearances. Both are full of impassioned eloquence and energy, and "The Prophecy" in particular has an ample share of the quality Matthew Arnold called "Celtic magic". As Blind's reputation as a poet began to rise in the 1880s, she undertook a number of other ambitious literary projects, including two highly praised biographies for the Eminent Women Series edited by John Henry Ingram. The first of these was also the first biography of the novelist George Eliot (1883; new edition 1888), and the second was