Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Mill, Harriet Taylor - S. E. Henshaw (essay date 1874)

S. E. Henshaw (essay date 1874)

SOURCE: “John Stuart Mill and Mrs. Taylor,” in Overland Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 6, 1874, pp. 516-23.

[In the following essay, Henshaw examines John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, focusing on Mill's excessive praise of Harriet Taylor.]

As we lay down the deeply interesting biography of John Stuart Mill, we can not help wondering whether the volume will raise or lower him in the general regard, and what is the place that will be finally assigned him in the world of letters. His own estimate of himself can not be accepted at all. He did not know enough of children to judge his own attainments in childhood, nor enough of religion to comprehend the extent to which he was defrauded in being brought up without it, or even to see that he was defrauded at all, nor enough of women to understand Mrs. Taylor and the influence which she exerted over his life. So he underestimates the precocious acquirements of...

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