I first heard about Harriet Taylor Mill when reading about her much more famous collaborator and future husband, the British philosopher and politician John Stuart Mill.

Appropriately for someone who remains in the margins of history despite her enormous contribution – including to her husband’s status – Taylor Mill was deeply angered by injustice. Throughout her life, she railed against the way society made it impossible for women to freely develop their individuality, arguing this was important for everybody – not just men.

In Enfranchisement of Women (1851), Taylor Mill’s only solo-authored essay published during her lifetime, she asked why women were still regarded as “mere appendages” to men without interests of their own. Her answer was characteristically blunt: “The only reason which can be given is that men like it.”

More than 20 years before her husband’s best-known work, On Liberty (1859) was published without any credit for her contribution, she had outlined what would become famous in that book as the “harm principle”: “Every human being has the right to all personal freedom which does not interfere with the happiness of some other.”

Her arguments were always on the side of independence, her sympathies with the powerless and oppressed. She astutely diagnosed the key political and economic question posed by the industrial revolution as being whether “the lot of the poor should be regulated for them, or by them”.

Taylor Mill was also a ferocious defender of “the pleasure of self-dependence” and the right to free speech. Her views were summarised in a programme of reform she........

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