Mill, Harriet Taylor - Susan Groag Bell (essay date 1990)
Susan Groag Bell (essay date 1990)
SOURCE: “The Feminization of John Stuart Mill,” in Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender, edited by Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom, State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 81-92.
[In the following essay, Bell explores critics' refusal to acknowledge Harriet Taylor's contribution to John Stuart Mill's writing, and offers possible reasons for this resistance.]
The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, the most famous male feminist of the nineteenth century, is inspired by a presence that has infuriated many critics—that of his wife Harriet. In Mill's words, she was “the most admirable person I had ever known” (p. 114). He insisted that his published writings were “not the work of one mind, but of the fusion of two” (p. 114), “as much her work as mine” (p. 145).1 He attributed to Harriet “the most valuable ideas and features in these [our] joint...
[The entire page is 5630 words long]
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