The definitive life of John Stuart Mill, one of the heroic giants of
Victorian England Richard Reeves' sparkling new biography can be read as
an attempt to do justice to this eminent thinker, and it succeeds
triumphantly. He reveals Mill as a man of action--a philosopher and
radical MP who profoundly shaped Victorian society and whose thinking
continues to illuminate our own. The product of an extraordinary and
unique education, Mill would become in time the most significant English
thinker of the nineteenth century, the author of the landmark essay On
Liberty, and one of the most passionate reformers and advocates of his
revolutionary, opinionated age. As a journalist he fired off weekly
articles demanding Irish land reform as the people of that nation
starved, as an MP he introduced the first vote on women's suffrage,
fought to preserve free-speech, and opposed slavery--and, in his private
life, for two decades pursued a love affair with another man's wife. To
understand Mill and his contribution to his time and ours, Richard
Reeves explores his life and work in tandem. The result is both a
riveting and authoritative biography of a man raised by his father to
promote happiness, whose life was spent in the pursuit of truth and
liberty for all.
