SOURCE: “‘The Lot of Gifted Ladies Is Hard’: A Study of Harriet Taylor Mill Criticism,” in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Vol. 9, No. 3, Summer, 1994, pp. 132-62.

In the following essay, Jacobs considers critiques written about Harriet Taylor and attempts to offer a new perspective on her life and influence on Mill.

Who can tell a life? How can I reconstruct the inside, not merely the shell, of another? Margaret Atwood quotes the end of Arnold Bennett's biography by Margaret Drabble:

“Many a time, … reading a letter or a piece of his journal, I have wanted to shake his hand, or to thank him, to say well done. I have written this instead.” “To shake his hand.” I suppose this may be what we really want, when we read biographies and when we write them: some contact, some communication, some way to know and to pay tribute. … We...