Autobiography

The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill is one of the most extraordinary records ever written of an intellectual formation. Mill describes, with great precision and almost no self-pity, what it was like to be taught Greek at three, Latin at seven, and the full Utilitarian system at fifteen by his father James Mill; what it cost him, in the mental crisis of his early twenties, to discover that the system had left him with no capacity for happiness or affection; how he found his way out through the poetry of Wordsworth, his friendship with Carlyle, and his long formative relationship with Harriet Taylor.

The book was published posthumously in 1873, the year of Mill's death. It is read today both as the indispensable companion to Mill's other works and as one of the supreme documents of nineteenth-century intellectual life.