Revisiting John Stuart Mill's "The Subjection of Women": A computer-assisted stylometric analysis

According to John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography (1873), his mature work should be thought of as the product not of one intellect and conscience but of three.’ He claimed that The Subjection of Women (1869) was co-authored by himself, Harriet Mill, and Helen Taylor. Most of J.S. Mill’s readers have been largely unconvinced both by his claims of co-authorship and by his encomiums of his co-authors. Rather than strengthening the claims of a common ‘fund of thought,’ collaboration, and co-authorship, his testimony to their abilities undermined them. Those who are most reluctant to take these claims at face value reject the idea that not only did Harriet Mill have an active, pervasive, and everlasting part in John Stuart Mill’s writings, but also that she was the originator of some of his most characteristic ideas. Others, however, readily admit her influence and her originality. Unlike her mother, Helen Taylor has never actually gotten any consideration as her stepfather’s co-author. Should we accept a key tenet of stylometric studies, that an author’s mind engrafts itself onto the text, then we might be able to test J.S. Mill’s claims of co-authorship. This paper presents the state of the question and the results of a computer-assisted authorship identification analysis of The Subjection of Women. We train three machine learning classifiers (SVM, K-NN, DT) on a dataset of essays from all three authors to learn and distinguish their writing styles. The models are then used to attribute text segments from Subjection to each author. The most effective models assign the text segments to John Stuart Mill. However, there are indications of authorial influences from Harriet Taylor Mill and, to lesser extent, from Helen Taylor. This is a particularly difficult authorship identification issue to address.

This zip file includes the corpus used for the training and test sets, the application code, summary results and comprehensive results of the three sets of tests.