The Voice of Harriet Taylor Mill

"The Voice of Harriet Taylor Mill is a work about collaboration: Harriet's life with members of her family, friends, and lover; Harriet's joint work with John Stuart Mill; and the author's interaction with the reader. The Prelude explores the concept of biography using Salman Rushdie's analogy of history as a process of "chutnification." The historical "facts," like a pickler's raw vegetables, are sensitively selected and combined with spices that aim to alter the flavor in "degree, but not in kind." Jo Ellen Jacobs gives Harriet's life "shape and form - that is to say, meaning" in a way that will "possess the authentic taste of truth."". "In the first chapter, the material for the first thirty years of Harriet's life is presented as a first-person diary. The text is firmly based on the letters and historical context of HTM's life, but the style invites the intimacy of reading someone's journal. The second chapter continues the chronological account of HTM's life until her death in 1858. In an interlude between the first and second chapters, Jacobs pauses to explore Harriet's life with John Stuart Mill during the twenty years she lived apart from her first husband while traveling and spending much of her time with John. In the third and final chapter, Jacobs argues persuasively that Harriet and John collaborated extensively on many works, including On Liberty."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Philosophy, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.