However, at the age of 25, Mill suffered an emotional breakdown. He writes, 'The habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings. . . . I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail.'
Mill had one great love in his life, in Mrs. Harriet Taylor; they did not marry, however, until after her husband died. She not only inspired him emotionally, but Mill also credited her as coauthor of his most important works: A System of Logic (1843), The Principles of Political Economy (1848), and On Liberty (1859).
Mill was not a professional academician. He spent most of his working life as an employee of the East India Company, from which he retired in 1865 to run for Parliament. He won the election and achieved sweeping reforms on behalf of the working classes, including exploited immigrant workers. He applied his philosophical theories to many practical causes. In The Subjection of Women (1861), he argues that women should be given the power to vote, to have careers, and to take positions of political and social leadership. He helped found the first women's suffrage society and was among the first to advocate birth control being openly available to all.
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