Autobiography

About the book

Mill recalls the demanding education directed by his father, describing early study and the formation of an energetic commitment to intellectual and social reform. His account then examines a crisis that exposed the limits of an outlook organized around analysis and the pursuit of public improvement. Poetry, feeling, friendship, and new influences become part of a more complicated understanding of human development. The narrative also traces his writings, work, marriage to Harriet Taylor, and participation in political life. Mill presents the history of his mind as something readers may find useful, rather than merely as a sequence of personal events. That purpose makes the book both a record of unusual formation and an inquiry into what an education can cultivate, overlook, and eventually need to repair.

• Education
• Intellectual development
• Feeling and reason

Why read it

For a candid account of how a powerful intellectual education could require later revision through feeling, poetry, and relationship.

Autobiography · English text with bracketed supplementary passages