 Conservative historian Gertrude Himmelfarb also credits Taylor Mill with having made a very significant difference to Mill’s philosophical output, at least during one stage of his life. In contrast to Jacobs, however, she maintains that this influence was decidedly for the worse. She decries in particular Taylor Mill’s effect on Mill’s views on liberty, arguing that it was only when Harriet’s influence on him was at its peak that Mill embraced a simplistic liberalism grounded on his sweeping and absolute liberty principle instead of a more nuanced political theory that treats liberty as an important value but one that can be limited by other values (Himmelfarb 1974, 208–72). (Himmelfarb’s maximalist reading clearly might be seen as a limit case of the approach that Rossi challenges.)