Premarital Relationship With Mill
Taylor was attracted to Mill, the first man she met who treated her as an intellectual equal. Mill was impressed with Taylor, asking her to read and comment on the latest book he was working on. The two became close friends.
In 1833 she lived in a separate residence from her husband, keeping her daughter with her while John Taylor raised the two older boys. John Taylor agreed to Harriet's friendship with Mill in exchange for the "external formality" of her residing "as his wife in his house". Over the next few years Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill exchanged essays on issues such as marriage and women's rights; the surviving essays reveal that Taylor held, on these matters, more radical views than Mill. Taylor was attracted to the socialist philosophy promoted by Robert Owen in books such as The Formation of Character (1813) and A New View of Society (1814). In her essays Taylor especially criticized the degrading effect of women's economic dependence upon men.
Read more about this topic: Harriet Taylor Mill
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