‘SHE HERSELF WAS HER OWN BEST FRIEND’ Reclaiming Mary Taylor: from ‘friend of Charlotte Brontë’ to successful Wellington businesswoman

<p dir="ltr">Mary Taylor is best known as ‘friend of Charlotte Brontë’ – the sub-title of the only two books about her. She could and should also be seen as a highly successful Wellington businesswoman of the 1850s. She ran a general store in the town for eight years, was a respected member of the community, had an active social life. She used her experiences here for her non-fiction book, The First Duty of Women, and her feminist novel, Miss Miles. In Miss Miles, teacher Maria Bell, starts her own school. ‘Her hands were full of work, and heart full of thankfulness,’ the narrator says. Maria finally realises that she is making a profit. As a result: ‘A silent change which she never noticed took place in her character and disposition. She got courage and self-confidence and was braced up to the certainty that she herself was her own best friend.’ Taylor had that experience in Wellington after opening the general store with her cousin Ellen Taylor in 1850. Ellen died 20 months later. Taylor bought out her cousin’s legatee, doubled the size of the building, purchased the land under it, employed a shop assistant and a dressmaker, and bought two ‘town acres’. She had owned a rental house nearby before starting the shop. Taylor’s story has been told through a lens of women and writing. She is said to have been ‘lonely’ in Wellington and found New Zealand ‘too barren’. However, these were assessments made by her best friend, Charlotte Brontë. Her own words show that she was ‘happy’ and thought she would see her shop-keeping days as the ‘most agreeable’ of her life. If we swap the lens to one of men and money, we see that wealthy William Couper wanted to marry her and that she was living in his house when she decided to go into business herself. We also see that her younger brother Waring Taylor stole the profits of her business - she was an unsecured creditor for £3000 in his 1884 bankruptcy – so she was much more financially successful than has been believed. That she used her New Zealand experience for First Duty is recognised but scholars have overlooked autobiographical elements in Miss Miles. The novel is said to be about female friendship, yet all five main women characters are landed in negative financial situations by men who mishandle or misappropriate money. Waring and Couper helped inform the characters of fraudster George Turner and suitor Everard Branksome. Giving Maria Bell the feeling of having become ‘her own best friend’ shows how Taylor recognised the way her success in business had given her self-confidence, courage and high self-esteem.</p>