Researching Barbara Taylor

She was born and raised in Western Canada. In 1971, she was awarded her first degree in political thought from the University of Saskatchewan. She then moved to London where she gained an MSc in the same subject at the London School of Economics, followed by a PhD in history at the University of Sussex. She taught history at the University of East London from 1993 until 2012 and then moved to Queen Mary, University of London, as joint professor of the schools of English & Drama, and History.

She has received research grants and fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust, the Nuffield Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation (1996), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Wellcome Trust.

Taylor has written a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, the early English feminist and republican, and continues to speak on her life, for example in 2009 at Newington Green Unitarian Church as part of the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of Wollstonecraft's birth.

With the psychologist Adam Phillips, Taylor is the co-author of On Kindness (2009).Taylor's memoir The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in Our Times, describing her years at Friern Hospital, was published in 2014.It was a finalist for the 2015 RBC Taylor Prize.

Her late husband, George Earl Taylor, was a carnival worker and the prime suspect in the murder case. He did not file a missing person report but told her family that she had left him for another man. He died of cancer in October 1987. Because he was a prime suspect, Hackmann's family excluded his name when they commissioned a new tombstone for her gravesite. Giving her full name and dates, it was added beneath one identifying her as "Tent Girl" at her grave at the Georgetown Cemetery. She had been buried in 1971 by local authorities when her case was stalled.