if it were at the cost of my life." The first, pseudonymous volume of poetry she published in the wake of Ferdinand's death (Poems, published by Claude Lake, 1867) is dedicated to her early mentor, the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, but the poems themselves also evoke the memory of Ferdinand. As James Diedrick remarked, the book "gains both biographical and literary significance when viewed as a 'double-voiced' volume that simultaneously celebrates Mazzini's victorious republicanism and obliquely honors Ferdinand, his ghostly double, whose squandered idealism and sacrifice haunt the margins of its pages". Blind's early political affiliations were shaped by the foreign refugees who frequented her stepfather's house, including Giuseppe Mazzini, for whom she entertained a passionate admiration and about whom she would publish reminiscences in the Fortnightly Review in 1891. Other revolutionaries who frequent her mother and stepfather's house in St. John's Wood included Karl Marx and Louis Blanc. Her early commitment to women's suffrage was influenced by her mother's friend Caroline Ashurst Stansfeld, who was active in the British feminist movement from its origins in the 1840s. These radical affiliations are manifested in Blind's politically charged poetry, and in her own unbending commitment to reform. As Richard Garnett observed, in the society of political refugees and radicals Blind was raised in, "admiration musts necessarily be reserved for audacity in enterprise, fortitude in adversity... anything breathing unconquerable defiance of the powers that were." Career In the early 1870s, after abandoning the male pseudonym she used for her first volume of verse, Blind emerged as a force to be reckoned with in London's literary bohemia. In early January 1870 she delivered a lecture on Percy Bysshe Shelley at the Church of Progress in London, stressing the poet's political radicalism. In July of that year she published a review-essay on William Michael Rossetti's edition of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Westminster Review that earned the praise of Algernon Charles Swinburne and gained her entry into a formerly all-male group of "Shelleyites" that included Swinburne, Rossetti, and Richard Garnett. (Garnett would remain Blind's friend and literary adviser throughout her lifetime.) A year after this essay appeared, Blind began publishing poetry and nonfiction in Dark Blue, a new Oxford-based journal that during its short run published prose and art by many of Britain's leading Pre-Raphaelites and aesthetes. Her wide-ranging publications in this journal are those of a daring feminist aesthete: