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Jane Harrison

The Knitting Circle: History

Biography,writing,bibliography.

British classical scholar.

He mother died shortly after her birth.

At the age of seventeen she was sent to finishing school at Cheltenham College for Ladies, under Dorothea Beale.

In 1870 she obtained honors in the London University examination for women and won a schollarship to Cambridge University.

She studied classics at Newnham College, Cambridge from 1874 to 1879. In 1879 she was place at the top of the Classical Tripos second class, which was the highest position held by either of the two new women's colleges. She was from that point called 'the cleverest woman in England'.

In 1879 she moved to London to study aecheology at the British Museum.

She became a teacher and lecturer who re-interpreted Greek myth in terms of art of archeology.

In 1879, when Jane Harrison was finishing her studies at Cambridge another young woman, Eugénie Sellers (1860-1943) was starting her studies in classics. The two women shared a flat in 1885 and they travelled together. Eugénie Sellers booked venues and organised the publicity for Jane Harrison's lectures. Eugénie Sellers referred to her Grande Passion (GP) or Grand Amour (GA) for Jane Harrison.

Eugénie Sellers did the same for Roman studies what Jane Harrison had done for Greek studies and dominated the British School at Rome in the mid-1920s. However, the two women fell out for some unknown reason in 1893. Eugénie Sellers married and became widely known as Mrs Arthur Strong.

Jane Harrison was Vice-President of the Hellenic Society from 1889 to 1896. In 1896 she was made a corresponding member of the Berlin Classical Archaeological Institute.

In 1898 she returned to Newnam College and became the college's first research fellow and also took the post of resident lecturer in classical archeology.

In her later years Jane Harrison shared her life with Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978), who became her archivist. Hope Mirrlees did classics at Newnham from 1910 to 1913 and was a pupil of Jane Harrison's. They became friends and lived and worked together until Jane Harrison's death in 1928. In the letters that Jane Harrison wrote to Hope Mirrlees their relationship was expressed as if from a teddy bear called Ursa Major. In 1915 they went to Paris to study Russian. On their return to Britain Jane Harrison began to lecture in Russian at Newnham College. She also studies other languages including Spanish, Swedish, Persian, and Hebrew.

In 1922 Jane Harrison retired from lecturing and she and Hope Mirrlees moved to a house in Bloomsbury, London.

"e;Hope Mirrlees arrived at the party half an hour early (do you admire her novels? - I can't get an ounce of joy from them, but we like seeing her and Jane Harrison billing and cooing together)."e;

Virginia Woolf, 1925.

• Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature, 1882.

• Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 1903.
  (1991), Princeton University Press, 720 pages, ISBN 0691015147 (paperback).

• Themis: A Study in the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912.

• Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 1921.

• Reminisciences of a Student's Life, 1925.

• The Book of the Bear, with Hope Mirrlees, 1926, a series of translations from the Russian.

• Life of the Arch-Priest Avvakum, by himself, with Hope Mirrlees, a translation of the 17th. century Russian novel.

• Mary Beard, (2000), "e;The Invention Of Jane Harrison"e;, Harvard University Press, 229 pages, ISBN 0674002121 (hardcover).

  • Synopsis:"e;Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) is the most famous female classicist in history, the author of books that revolutionised our understanding of Greek culture and religion. A star in the British academic world, she became the quintessential Cambridge woman - asVirginia Woolfsuggested when, in 'A Room of One's Own', she claims to have glimpsed Harrison's ghost in the college gardens. This innovative portrayal of a fascinating woman raises the question of who wins (and how) in the competition for academic fame. Mary Beard captures Harrison's ability to create her own image. and she contrasts her story with that of Eugene Sellers Strong, a younger contemporary and onetime intimate, the author of major work on Roman art and once a glittering figure at the British School in Rome - but who lost the race for renown. The setting for the story of Harrison's career is classical scholarship in this period - its internal arguments and allegiances and especially the influence of the anthropological strain most strikingly exemplified by Sir James Frazer. Questioning the common criteria for identifying intellectual 'influence' and 'movements', Beard exposes the mythology that is embedded in the history of classics. At the same time she provides a vivid picture of a sparkling intellectual scene."e;

  • Superwoman in Cambridgeby Elizabeth Lowry inThe Times Literary Supplement, 30th. June, 2000, page 12. "e;Jane Ellen Harrison is perhaps the most famous female classicist Britain ever produced, and was in her own lifetime undoubtedly one of the most controversial. In 1891, thePall Mall Gazettereferred to her, with only a little exaggeration, as 'the lady to whose lectures during the last ten years the revival of popular interest in Greece is almost soley due'."e;

  • Secret historybyJames DavidsoninThe Guardian: Saturday Review, 29th. July, 2000, page 10. "e;With her Sapphic love, her fondness for William Morris wallpaper, her languor and quotability, her deployment of teddy bears - in one letter, Harrison's toy bear invites Hope Mirlees, 'his young wife', to dine in Hall with Harrison , his 'elder wife', and signs off with a picture of the constellation Ursa Major - Harrison fits perfectly into the history of the Decadents and Effeminates, a history in which women rarely find a place. In some ways she is whatOscar Wilde, four years younger and the most brilliant classicist of his year, might have been had he succeeded in his ambition to become an Oxford don."e;

    "e;While Harrison worked up her lectures, Strong was busy booking venues and arranging publicity. At some point, however, there was a 'terrific bust-up' and Harrison is later to be found angered by Strong and the 'unscrupulous way she used people to get on', while in the drafts of her autobiography Strong refers darkly to the kind of woman who applied 'the power of fascination ... where she could, on callow youths chiefly and younger women'. Board is too careful a scholar to draw conclusions about the precise nature of the 'bust-up', and too careful a historian to out Harrison and Strong anachronistically as a lesbian couple, but she makes a cogent case for rewriting the history of Classics in a way that would make Harrison less isolated, treating the two women as partners rather than ships that pass in the night. This book does not celebrate a rare and uncomplicated feminine triumph is the still-too-butch Academy, nor does it make easy connections between Harrison's Sapphic life and work, for all its bearded snakes, powerful goddesses and transient gods."e;

  • Battle of the booksby Ruth Padel inThe Independent on Sunday, 30th. July, 2000, pages 29-30. "e;Elegantly, Beard dismantles myth, interrogates potential evidence, and leaves the rest to you. ' 'Was Jane Harrison gay?' is a question this book hopes to transcend,' she says dryly.Virginia Woolfthought Harrison and Mirrlees were lovers. But then, as Beard points out, she would."e;

  • A reputation for being smartby Lisa Jardine inThe Sunday Times Culture magazine, 6th. August, 2000, page 41. "e;Beard's gripping little book is an attempt to set the record a little straighter on Harrison. It is also an attempt to put Sellers back - to establish that she and Harrison formed an intellectual partnership, that she, too, made a difference to her chosen academic discipline, to make her 'worth remembering'."e;

  • Greek love and learningby Oliver Taplin inThe Independent: The Weekend Review, 12th. August, 2000, page 11. "e;Anyone climbing aboard this careering mystery tour of a book should be prepared to be taken for a ride. It looks like a biography: faded snapshots, footnotes, gossip around the famous - Gladstone, the Beerbohm Trees, Virginia Woolf - and, of course, speculation about sex-lives. But this is no biography in any orthodox sense. On the contrary, it is a cluster of didactic essays which amusingly but relentlessly insist that orthodox biography is a fraud, that its claims to uncover the truth are delusary."e;

  • Myth-making behind the scholar of mythologyby Margalit Finkelberg inThe Times Higher Education Supplement, 22nd. February, 2002, page 24. "e;Whether or not the classicists who worked in Cambridge at the beginning of the 20th century, Harrison among them, thought of themselves as a 'school', their impact on the subsequent history of classical scholarship is incontestable. After all, how many scholarly works written a century ago are, like Harrison'sProlegomena, available today in paperback? This is why I find it hard to accept Beard's contention that Harrison's reputation is largely a matter of chance. Ultimately it was created by clever manipulation of her career - first by Harrison herself, then posthumously by her friends and pupils. However,The Invention of Jane Harrisonis an enjoyable book that will be of interest to classicists and those interested in the history of scholarship, female education and the life and mores of academic and intellectual circles in late 19th-century England."e;

• Elliman and Roll, (1986), pages 98-99.

• Sandra J. Peacock, (1989), "e;Jane Ellen Harrison: The mask and the self"e;, Yale University Press, ISBN 0300041284 (hardcover).

• Jessie Stewart, (1959), "e;Jane Ellen Harrison: A portrait from letters"e;.

Biography,writing,bibliography.

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The Knitting Circle

First uploaded 1st. August, 2000.

Last altered 24th. February, 2002