By the late 1880s she had become prominent among New Woman writers such as Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Amy Levy, Mona Caird, Olive Schreiner, Rosamund Marriott Watson, and Katharine Tynan.

[4] Much of the evidence for this period in Blind's life is contained in a 55-page typescript in the British Library, a fragmentary story of a precocious, rebellious girl who is expelled from the Ladies' Institute for her freethinking, and who then travels to Switzerland for a long stay with maternal relatives in Zürich, before embarking on an unaccompanied walking tour through the Alps – highly unusual at that time for a single woman.

[7] He was motivated in part by his stepfather Karl Blind and other revolutionary exiles living in London, who were outraged by the way Bismarck treated the German states like pawns in his empire-building strategy.

During his university years he also participated in the left-wing opposition to Bismarck, and after graduating in March 1866, during a hiking tour of Bavaria and Bohemia, he wrote to Blind describing the depth of his opposition to Bismarck: "As I wandered through the blooming fields of Germany, that were so soon to be crushed under the iron heel of war and saw the number of youths pass by that were to lose their lives for the selfish aims of the few, the thought came quite spontaneously to punish the cause of so much evil, even if it were at the cost of my life.

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.

"[9] 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.

As Richard Garnett observed, in the society of political refugees and radicals Blind was raised in, "admiration must necessarily be reserved for audacity in enterprise, fortitude in adversity... anything breathing unconquerable defiance of the powers that were.

Her wide-ranging publications in this journal are those of a daring feminist aesthete: 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.

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.

"[16] 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), Olive Schreiner's Dreams (1890), and Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1891), did not improve its fortunes.

The anonymous writer then praises in turn "the admirable Life of Madame Roland... certainly the most graphic and accurate picture of the great revolutionary heroine ever penned in England, or, for that matter, in France," and Tarantella, a "quaint, weird story, full of imagination and suggested thought."

However, "it is as a poetess that Miss Blind has scored her greatest triumphs," the writer continues, noting that the verses in The Prophecy of St. Oran and Other Poems "made an instant mark, many of them becoming rapidly popular," and adding that "The Heather on Fire, 'The Sower', 'The Dead', and 'The Street Children's Dance' are even now being constantly reprinted wherever the English language is read and spoken throughout the world."

Arnold Bennett's pseudonymous review of Birds of Passage in the 22 May issue of Woman, when he was assistant editor of the magazine, indicates the quality of poetry Blind was writing just a few years before her death.

"Miss Blind sings in many modes—she is probably more various than any other woman-poet in English literature," Bennett writes, "and in all her songs there is an original, intimately personal accent which one can catch, but not imprison within a paragraph."

Bennett adds that Blind "excels in lyric verse," noting that many of the poems in the new volume, including "Prelude" and "A Fantasy", "are distinguished achievements, and they show, I think, a more complete technique than anything even in Dramas in Miniature.

Blind died in London on 26 November 1896, bequeathing to Newnham College, Cambridge, the greater part of her property, which had mostly come to her late in life as a legacy from a half-brother Meyer Jacob ("Max") Cohen.