The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill (review)

The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, edited by Jo Ellen Jacobs; pp. xliv + 604. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, $59.95.

The relationship between John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor has long been a subject of interest, speculation, and controversy. This has been doubly unfortunate. Taylor's influence has been used to disparage and underestimate the depth of Mill's commitment to sexual equality, and the centrality of this core conviction both in his life and in the total context of his work. And it has allowed Taylor herself to be disparaged and treated as a postscript to Mill.

Jo Ellen Jacobs's excellent and scholarly edition of The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill will go a long way toward redressing this situation. Based largely on the letters in the Mill-Taylor Collection at the London School of Economics, it is a comprehensive, meticulously researched and edited work, which brings out the breadth of Taylor's scholarship, the range of the subjects she tackled, and the vigour and forceful expression of her arguments. It also adds greatly to our knowledge of Taylor as a person, and our understanding of the extraordinary juggling act she maintained for so long between her private life with Mill and the public facade of a life with John Taylor.

The letters published in this volume show the ongoing communication between Harriet and John, and the extent of John's cooperation with her to maintain the illusion, even to her family, that they still lived together. The letters also demonstrate Harriet's early passion for him. Jacobs's analysis of the letters produces the interesting hypothesis that she contracted syphilis from him, which produced an estrangement and lifelong health problems for Harriet. The letters also show the depth of her affection and concern for him, as she nursed him devotedly through his final illness over three months in 1849, to the exclusion of all else, including Mill. Such was the complexity of the emotional life and the personal relationships of this extraordinary woman, whose story is worth telling in its own right. Jacobs is to be congratulated for having undertaken that project, and Indiana University Press is to be congratulated on the quality of the book.

The book is in three sections--"Writings on Women," "Writings on Other Issues," and "Letters." Section One groups four sets of writings on "Education of Women," "Marriage and Divorce," "Women's Rights," and "Violence and Domestic Violence." This last heading contains writings produced jointly by Taylor and Mill, in the form of newspaper articles and a pamphlet--all of which are bravely outspoken and, unfortunately, rivetingly relevant still. The issue of provocation argued here is still under debate today. These writings point again and again to the discrepancy between property offences and offences against the person (such as wives or maids) that Catherine MacKinnon parodies in Feminism Unmodified (1987), in her vignette of the man who goes out on his own, wearing a gold Rolex watch, being chided for "asking" to be robbed.

"Marriage and Divorce" comprises five short pieces, and "Women's Rights" has five short pieces and the full text of Taylor's famous essay "The Enfranchisement of Women." This is the work with which readers are likely to be most familiar. "Writings on Other Issues" contains works on ethics, religion, art, and a miscellaneous section, which includes the well-known Chapter Seven of Book Four of Mill's Principles of Political Economy (1848), "On the Probable Futurity of the Working Classes." It also contains what was, for me, the highlight of this section--an astonishingly scholarly and rich account of the history of printing and early manuscripts, in the guise of a lengthy "Life of Caxton." This is a fascinating work which deserves a wide audience.

"Letters" is the largest section of the book, and comprises letters to Mill, to Taylor's family and friends, to John Taylor, and to Helen Taylor, her daughter, whose travels while establishing...