Helen Taylor was born at Kent Terrace,
London, on 27 July 1831. She was the only daughter and youngest of three children of John Taylor, wholesale druggist of Mark Lane, and his wife
Harriet, daughter of Thomas Hardy of Birksgate, near
Kirkburton, Yorkshire, where the family had been lords of the manor for centuries. Her father, a man of education, inspired his daughter with a lifelong love for history and strong filial affection from an early age. Taylor's education was pursued desultorily and privately. She was the constant companion of her mother who was continually travelling as a result of her poor health. Mrs. Taylor's letters to her daughter testify to deep sympathy between the two. Taylor's father died in July 1849, and in April 1851 her mother married
John Stuart Mill. Her mother, wanted Taylor to be free to do "what she hoped all women would one day have the liberty to do: to work at a job of her own choosing. The 'experiments in living' that Harriet and John encouraged in
On Liberty began with her own daughter". Taylor followed her dream of becoming an actress and went to work at Sunderland in 1856 and worked as an actress for two years. Her mother died on 3 November 1858 at the
Hôtel d'Europe, Avignon, when on the way with her husband to the south of France. In order to be near his wife's grave Mill bought a house at Avignon, which subsequently passed to Taylor. She now devoted herself entirely to Mill, and became his "chief comfort" and he valued her intelligent input. Taylor not only took entire charge of practical matters and of his heavy correspondence, answering many of his letters herself, but also may have co-operated in his literary work, especially in
The Subjection of Women (1869), much of which might have been suggested by her mother. Mill used to say of all his later work that it was the result not of one intelligence, but of three, of himself, his wife, and his step-daughter. Mill died in 1873. Taylor, who had edited in 1872, with a biographical notice, the miscellaneous and posthumous works of
H. T. Buckle, a devoted adherent of Mill's school of thought, edited in 1873 Mill's
Autobiography; and in 1874 she issued, with an introduction, his
Three Essays on Religion. Taylor also played a large part in Mill's botanical life. A description of a botanical collecting trip, to the
Pyrenees in 1860, illustrates not only Taylor's strength of character but her devotion to Mill: "Helen had a wearying time, trundling along doggedly in her awkward clothes, travelling sometimes four hours on foot and eight on horseback in a day, in scorching sun, on rocky mountain trails; sinking knee deep in snow over the passes, splashing through the thaw, stopping at desolate little inns where no lady traveller had ever been seen before". Upon Mill's death in 1873, as the executor of his will, Taylor wrote to Dr.
Joseph Dalton Hooker, the then Director of the
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, asking Hooker if he "would be willing to look over his catalogue Herbarii and to select from it the names of such specimens you would like to have". Hooker took Taylor up on her offer and given the extent of the collection, approximately 12,000 specimens, the Mill
Herbarium was divided, with her consent, between herbaria in the UK, USA and Australia, the receipt of the portion of Mill's Herbarium at
Melbourne being reported in the paper of the time,
The Argus. A letter to Taylor from Baron
Ferdinand von Mueller, the then Government Botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne, Australia, thanking her for her generosity, describes the receipt of a portion of the Mill Herbarium as "one of the greatest triumphs of my life". The approximately 4000 specimens, believed to comprise the Australian portion of the Mill Herbarium, are still housed within the
National Herbarium of Victoria (MEL), a large percentage of these still awaiting cataloguing. The handwritten labels accompanying these specimens are written in both Mill's and what's believed to be, Taylor's hand. == Political activism ==