ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Mrs. Taylor found her husband much more gravely ill than she had expected, in fact, as the doctor soon gave her to understand, dying of cancer, when at last she arrived on 14 May, 1849. For two months until his death she then devoted all her strength to nursing the invalid. A long series of hastily written notes to Mill give a continuous account of her fluctuating hopes and fears. Captain Antony Sterling, the brother of Mill's friend John Sterling who had died not long before, was at the time preparing for publication a collection of his brother's letters. This never appeared, though it was later to serve Thomas Carlyle for his Life of John Sterling. When John Taylor's will, made less than five months before his death, was opened, it was found that he had left to his wife a life interest in the whole of his property.
