 Had Taylor Mill produced a substantial body of philosophical work that could uncontroversially be called her own, we would not need to concern ourselves with what her contemporaries had to say about her abilities; we could make our own assessment. Because she lacks such a corpus, however, and because questions about what she might have written or how much influence she might have had on Mill’s intellectual career are so difficult to answer on purely textual grounds, the estimates of her intellectual powers formed by people who knew her must be taken into account.