John Stuart Mill

Marriage

Mill and harriet had carried on an “affair” of extraordinary intimacy, heroic sexual abstinence, and scrupulous concern for both privacy and the appearance of propriety for twenty years. Now that John Taylor had died, it would seem that Mill and Harriet could simply marry and leave the past behind them. On the contrary, nothing would prove more difficult.

To begin with, the mere fact of getting married would serve to confirm all of the old rumors that malicious gossips had been spreading about them for years. In an ironic way, legalizing and consummating their relationship would give credence to those who had sought in one way or another to delegitimate their earlier relationship. Second, both Mill and Harriet had been very critical of marriage relationships, so that taking the step of getting married would require both acquiescence in an institution of which they had been critical in print and symbolic gestures to indicate the extent to which their marriage was not to be a merely conventional one. Finally, the redefinition of relationships with others, especially for Mill, was extremely complicated. Emotionally, they had been dependent solely on each other for some time. His best and closest friend, Sterling, had died, and the same was true for Harriet – Eliza had passed away. Mill and Harriet had wrapped themselves in a cocoon of seeming propriety in isolation from others, and they now found that making a public declaration was the hardest thing to do.