SOURCE: “Constructing ‘Harriet Taylor’: Another Look at J. S. Mill's Autobiography,” in Constructions of the Self, edited by George Levine, Rutgers University Press, 1992, pp. 191-212.

In the following essay, Zerilli explores Harriet Taylor's impact on John Stuart Mill's life, including the possibility that Taylor acted as a “mother-figure” to Mill.

But if I were to say in what above all she is preeminent, it is her profound knowledge of human nature. To know all its depths and elevations she had only to study herself.

—John Stuart Mill

Readers of John Stuart Mill will recognize this passage as but another expression of his homage to Harriet Taylor, a woman of exceptional character and superior intellect. “The knowledge and contemplation of her,” Mill wrote, was itself the study of humankind—a study that, for him, “so inferior in nature,” involved a “long course of education.”¹ Mill's timeless and genderless portrait...