Taylor, Harriet (1807–58)

Harriet Taylor, née Hardy, was born and raised in Walworth, England, where she married John Taylor in 1826. She was introduced to John Stuart Mill in 1830. At the time, she was a restless young wife and mother, deeply involved in a coterie of unitarian radicals whose liberal politics, feminism, and literary and philosophical activities suited her exactly. She had hoped to become a writer, but put aside this aspiration in order to become Mill’s intellectual partner. Her amiable and generous husband acquiesced in the peculiar arrangement for her sake. In 1851, two years after Taylor’s death, Taylor married Mill, and the couple lived and worked together until her death in 1858. In 1859, Mill began publishing the work of their marital collaboration, extravagantly dedicating everything to her.

Their first collaborative work was the chapter on the labouring classes in Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (which, published in 1848, prompted an overblown dedication from Mill, discreetly pasted into a few gift copies). Taylor also directed his work on the writings later published as Three Essays on Religion (1874). In 1851, she wrote ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’, which argued for full equality between the sexes with special emphasis on educational reform and equal access to employment. Taylor’s greatest claim to lasting importance stems from her role in the writing of On Liberty (1859), which Mill later called ‘more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my name’ (Mill 1873: 249).

Unfortunately, Mill’s sober record of Taylor’s contributions has been rendered suspect by the hallucinatory lavishness of his praise of her powers. The questions surrounding their collaboration, however, do not concern Taylor’s personal attributes, but the extent and nature of her contribution to Mill’s work. Her own writing does not settle those questions definitively.

Most of the relevant letters, essays and notes in Taylor’s solitary corpus are allusive supplements to ongoing dialogue with Mill. Some of this writing supports Mill’s account of her work. Taylor’s paragraphs on marriage (c.1832, Hayek 1951) are echoed in ‘The Subjection of Women’ (1869) and the distinctive themes in On Liberty first appear in her essay on toleration (c.1832, Hayek 1951). There she treats social conformity as a great evil which breeds injustice, stifles individuality and discourages character development. She charges that the indolent acceptance of popular opinion leaves people with baseless conviction and neither the patience nor skills needed to acquire genuine knowledge. She complains that independent thinkers must contend with ignorant majorities. Her arguments are weak, but her whole mode of thought on these topics informs in On Liberty.

Mill’s corpus sometimes seems to split irreconcilably in two, and Taylor’s influence may have caused the apparent fissure. Perhaps the author of in On Liberty, ‘The Subjection of Women’ and various writings on art and society was the offspring of their intimacy, conceived and nurtured in their conversations.