The First Duty of Women. A Series of Articles Reprinted from the Victoria Magazine. 1865 to 1870.

Interesting . . . in the way that Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is interesting, though I personally find Taylor's First Duty a more readable book than Wollstonecraft's Vindication.

Mary Taylor, best known as (along with Ellen Nussey) one of Charlotte Bronte's two BFFs from school days, was the adventuresome among the three, having emigrated to New Zealand, earned sufficient wealth from a general store to become financially independent, and then having returned to England to take up feminist causes. The "first duty of women"? To earn money, which would secure the woman's financial independence from family and from men – a realistic goal in the pre-suffragist period.

The First Duty of Women was published as a show more series of essays from 1865 to 1870 in Emily Faithfull's "Victoria Magazine" and then reprinted by Faithfull in book form in 1870. First read Taylor's novel, Miss Miles (personally, I think, a far better read than George Gissing's similarly-themed The Odd Women), but then, as a matter of curiosity, read The First Duty of Women for its parallel-track to the themes of Miss Miles.

Taylor wouldn't be read today were it not for her far more famous BFF, Charlotte Bronte, but Taylor's novel Miss Miles is an interesting piece of Bronteana and The First Duty of Women is an interesting follow-up to Miss Miles.

The First Duty of Women is available in "publish on demand" format, but you can find it for free on Google Books and the POD publications seem just to be a copying of the Google Books PDF.

And see also

• Mary Taylor, Friend of Charlotte Bronte: Letters from New Zealand and Elsewhere
• and Taylor's Swiss Notes by Five Ladies.

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