Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so.
One of the greatest prodigies of his era, John Stuart Mill (1806-73) was studying arithmetic and Greek by the age of three, as part of an astonishingly intense education at his father's hand. Intellectually brilliant, fearless and profound, he became a leading liberal thinker of the Victorian age, whose works - including On Liberty, Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women and this Autobiography - are among the crowning achievements of the period. Here he describes the pressures placed on him by his childhood, the mental breakdown he suffered as a young man, his struggle to understand a world of feelings and emotions far removed from his father's strict didacticism, and the later development of his own radical beliefs. A moving account of an extraordinary life, this compelling autobiography reveals a man of deep integrity, constantly searching for truth.
In his introduction, John Robson considers Mill's life, his friendships with contemporary philosophers and artists, and his motivation for writing the Autobiography.