Jane Ellen Harrison

• 1. Introduction

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  Jane Ellen Harrison once lectured on Athenian gravestones in Glasgow, and 1,600 people turned up to hear her speak. That is a striking turnout for a talk about ancient funerary carvings. Harrison spent her career at Newnham College, Cambridge, at a time when few women in England held any academic post at all. What in her background prepared her to argue that Greek religion began not in myth but in ritual? Why would a hiring committee reject her for a professorship she seemed destined for, and why would a war end her travels abroad for good? This documentary follows Harrison's path from a Yorkshire childhood to a body of work that reached poets, novelists, and generations of later scholars.

• 2. A Motherless Start

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  Charles and Elizabeth Harrison welcomed a daughter, Jane, in Cottingham, Yorkshire, on the 9th of September 1850. Elizabeth died of puerperal fever shortly afterward, leaving her husband, a timber merchant, to raise Jane without a mother. A series of governesses took over her education, teaching her German, Latin, Ancient Greek, and Hebrew. She kept adding languages long after her governesses left, eventually reaching about sixteen, including Russian. Cheltenham Ladies' College awarded her a Certificate before she moved on to university-level study. In 1874 she continued her classical training at Newnham College, Cambridge, the institution that would define the rest of her working life.

• 3. Museum Years and First Books

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  Between 1880 and 1897, Harrison studied Greek art and archaeology at the British Museum under Sir Charles Newton. She paid her way by lecturing at the museum and at schools, mostly private boys' schools. Her travels through Italy and Germany brought her into contact with Wilhelm Klein, a scholar working in Prague. Klein introduced her to the archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld, who invited her on his excavation tours in Greece. In 1888 she began writing for The Woman's World, the periodical Oscar Wilde was then editing, contributing a piece titled 'The Pictures of Sappho'. She also translated Maxime Collignon's Mythologie figurée de la Grèce, published in 1883, and supplied commentary for Margaret Verrall's selections from Pausanias, Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, in the same year. This body of work earned Harrison honorary degrees from the University of Aberdeen in 1895 and the University of Durham in 1897. She was engaged to marry the scholar R. A. Neil, but he died suddenly of appendicitis in 1901, before the wedding could take place. Neil's sudden death left Harrison unmarried for the rest of her life, and her closest bonds from then on formed inside her academic world instead.

• 4. A Blocked Professorship

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  Mary Beard has described Harrison as 'the first woman in England to become an academic, in the fully professional sense - an ambitious, full-time, salaried, university researcher and lecturer.' Newnham College made that description literal, appointing Harrison as a lecturer in 1898 and renewing her post continuously until she retired in 1922. Reginald Stuart Poole's death in 1895 opened the Yates Professorship of Classical Art and Archaeology at University College London, and Harrison became a candidate. The hiring committee recommended her for the position. Flinders Petrie blocked that recommendation, arguing that Harrison, though expert in religion, lacked the knowledge base of her rival, Ernest Gardner. Gardner got the job instead and went on to work closely with Petrie for thirty years. That professional setback left Harrison anchored at Newnham for good, deepening bonds she had already formed there, including one with a woman named Ellen Wordsworth Crofts.

• 5. Friendships and Rivalries

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  Ellen Wordsworth Crofts, later the second wife of Sir Francis Darwin, had been Harrison's best friend since their student days together at Newnham. Their closeness lasted from 1898 until Ellen's death in 1903. A different, more turbulent bond tied Harrison to Eugénie Sellers Strong, a friendship whose depth the classicist Mary Beard later explored in a monograph. That friendship ended in a dramatic breach during the 1890s. After the breakup, Sellers built her reputation as an authority on the material culture of Imperial Rome. Harrison, meanwhile, pushed further into the primitive ritual origins of Greek drama. Despite moving in different directions over time, the two women resembled each other closely in concerns and style. Their shared habits of argument became known as classical anthropology.

  Harrison grew close to Francis MacDonald Cornford, who lived from 1874 to 1943, and when he married in 1909 she became extremely upset. Out of that disruption came a new friendship with Hope Mirrlees, whom Harrison called her 'spiritual daughter'. Cornford himself belonged to the circle that grew up around Harrison's ideas, a group later remembered as the Cambridge Ritualists.

• 6. From Ritual to Myth

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  In 1882, Harrison published her first monograph, The Odyssey in Art and Literature. It argued that Homer's epic and the images on Greek vases drew on the same deep well of mythology. That claim ran against the common opinion in classical archaeology at the time. Her major work, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, appeared in 1903 and worked from the opposite direction: ritual first, myth second. 'In theology facts are harder to seek, truth more difficult to formulate than in ritual,' she wrote. She opened the book by analyzing well-known Athenian festivals, including the Anthesteria and the harvest festivals Thargelia and Plynteria. She also examined women's festivals such as Skirophoria, Stenia, and Haloa, finding in them what she read as primitive survivals.

  Harrison became the central figure of the group that history remembers as the Cambridge Ritualists. Prolegomena went on to leave a compelling mark on the later work of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Hilda Doolittle. Her ritual-first method was about to meet a very different intellectual current: Charles Darwin's ideas about how cultures evolve.

• 7. Darwin, Doubt and the Vote

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  Harrison drew directly on the cultural applications of Charles Darwin's work in her writing on religion. She and her generation leaned heavily on the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, who was himself shaped by Darwin's evolutionary ideas. His 1871 book, Primitive Culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom, supplied many of their new themes. After applying this Darwinian lens to the origins of religion, Harrison concluded that religiosity itself was anti-intellectual and dogmatic. Even so, she defended the cultural necessity of religion and mysticism. In her 1909 essay 'The Influence of Darwinism on the Study of Religion,' she wrote: 'Every dogma religion has hitherto produced is probably false, but for all that the religious or mystical spirit may be the only way of apprehending some things, and these of enormous importance.'

  Harrison herself was an atheist. She also counted as a moderate suffragist, defending women's right to vote through her scholarship in anthropology rather than through protest. Responding to an anti-suffragist critic, she wrote that the Women's Movement was 'simply the demand that in the life of woman, as in the life of man, space and liberty shall be found for a thing bigger than either manhood or womanhood - for humanity.' Her personal motto came from Terence: homo sum; humani nihil mihi alienum est, 'I am a human being; nothing that is human do I account alien.' That same conviction, that humanity mattered more than any single dogma, would carry her through the isolation a coming war was about to bring.

• 8. War and a Literary Afterlife

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  World War I marked a deep break in Harrison's life. She never visited Italy or Greece again after the war, spending her later years mostly revising or condensing her earlier publications. Her pacifist views left her isolated during this period. After retiring from Newnham, she lived briefly in Paris with Hope Mirrlees before poor health brought her back to London in 1925. There, she published her memoirs, Reminiscences of a Student's Life, through the Hogarth Press, the imprint run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. She spent her final two years living at 11 Mecklenburgh Square, on the fringes of Bloomsbury, and died there at 77. She was buried in St Marylebone Cemetery, in East Finchley.

  Virginia Woolf gave Harrison a strange kind of immortality in A Room of One's Own, published in 1929, naming her only by initials separated by long dashes: 'the famous scholar, could it be J---- H---- herself?' The critic Camille Paglia named Harrison as an influence on her own work. She did so first in her 1990 book Sexual Personae. She did so again in a long essay collected in her 1993 volume Sex, Art and American Culture, titled 'Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf.' Paglia argued that second-wave feminists had ignored Harrison's career to preserve their claims about male domination in academia. In 1993, Tina Passman published an article called 'Out of the Closet and into the Field: Matriculture, the Lesbian Perspective, and Feminist Classics.' In it, she linked the scholarly neglect of Harrison to a broader discomfort with lesbian perspectives in the field. Mary Beard's essays and her 2000 book, The Invention of Jane Harrison, published by Harvard University Press, have pushed wider appreciation of Harrison's work. The two books that made her name were revised again in 1908 and 1922, with a further revision in 1927. Her arguments stayed in circulation decades after she first wrote them.