Mary Taylor was, with Ellen Nussey, one of Charlotte Brontë's two BFFs from boarding school days at Margaret Wooler's school at Roe Head (which is not to be confused with Charlotte's earlier boarding school, the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, which is the model for Jane Eyre's Lowood Institute). Mary Taylor was also the model for the character of Rose Yorke in Charlotte's novel Shirley.

The adventuresome one of the three friends, Mary Taylor traveled through Europe (and was responsible for encouraging Charlotte's trip to study French in Brussels, the basis for Villette). Subsequently, Taylor emigrated to New Zealand, where she "earned her fortune" operating a general store so that she was able to return to England and pursue feminist causes and writing.

Swiss Notes by Five Ladies is a travel story of a tour of the Swiss Alps by the older Mary Taylor and by four younger women who accompany her in the early 1870s. The book was published in Leeds by Inchbold & Beck and is available in PDF download from Google Books and has also been reprinted (presumably from the PDF file) in publish-on-demand available from various publishers on AbeBooks.

It's a pity that Virago Press has not republished this lost-and-forgotten classic of women's travel literature. Though Mary Taylor would not be remembered today were it not for the Brontë connection, her novel, Miss Miles, is in my opinion a better novel than George Gissing's better-known and similarly themed The Odd Women. Swiss Notes, a more light-hearted work, is a charming piece (apparently multiply authored by Taylor and her four companions) and might well be worth a Virago republication, perhaps in a twofer volume accompanied by Taylor's similarly unavailable (except in Google Books and publish-on-demand) collection of feminist essays The First Duty of Women. ( )