Mill, John Stuart (1806-1873)

John Stuart Mill was a logician, utilitarian philosopher, Liberal Member of Parliament, writer, and champion of women’s enfranchisement, whose proto-feminist work and economic views were respected by George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. As a young writer seeking to make his name known, Lewes was, for a time, an acolyte of Mill’s. There are some resemblances between Eliot and Mill's wife Harriet Taylor, to whom he was devoted. However, Eliot thought Mill's accounts of his wife in his 1873 autobiography were too exaggerated and in a letter to Barbara Bodichon in December of 1873, Eliot expressed concern that by revealing his intense feelings for his wife, Mill would neutralize all the good that might have come from the beautiful fact of his devotion to her.