Classical scholar.

9 September 1850 – 15 April 1928

Jane Ellen Harrison  – A Tribute by Sue Blundell

In 1909 the bohemian artist Augustus John arrived in Cambridge to paint the portrait of Jane Harrison, a lecturer in Classics at Newnham College. Aged 59 at the time, Harrison had revolutionised the way people think about the culture of ancient Greece. She got on well with John, and in a letter to one of her friends she discusses her appreciation of his artistic approach.

Harrison had known since childhood that she would never be seen as conventionally pretty; but Augustus John’s portrait, which still hangs in Newnham College, shows her as a handsome and self-assured if rather sad woman. She had struggled hard to get her lectureship in Cambridge, and if in the painting she looks a little tired and preoccupied, it is quite understandable.

Jane Ellen Harrison was born on 9 September,1850, in Cottingham, a village just outside Hull in East Yorkshire. Her mother died soon after her birth, and while her brothers were sent away to public school, Jane stayed at home and was educated by a series of governesses. She was taught needlework, deportment, and other ‘feminine’ skills – ‘miscellaneous rubbish’, in Harrison’s own words. But one of the governesses did at least provide her with the rudiments of Greek, Latin, Hebrew and German. Eventually, after a scandalous flirtation with a curate, Harrison was packed off to Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

In 1871, when she was 21, Harrison began receiving an annual income of £300 (a considerable sum) under her mother’s will. A few years later she won a scholarship as the outstanding candidate in the University of Cambridge’s General Examination for Women; and in 1874 she went to Newnham College to study classics. Newnham had been founded three years earlier to provide accommodation for women who wanted to attend Cambridge’s new ‘Lectures for Ladies’.

In 1879 Harrison was awarded her degree, and left Cambridge for London to look for work. For the next few years she earned her living lecturing in schools, museums, and working men’s clubs. Sir Charles Newton, the keeper of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum, was so impressed by her talks that he invited her to guide parties of ladies around the Museum. Later she toured the country giving ‘perambulating lectures’, theatrical events where she dressed in striking spangled gowns, and used dramatic lighting to simulate the atmosphere of ancient religious rituals. At one lecture she got two of her friends to stand at the back of the hall and whirl bullroarers – an ancient musical instrument consisting of a piece of wood attached to a string which makes a roaring sound when swung in a circle – so that she could recreate the auditory effects of ancient mystery cults. Hundreds of people used to attend Harrison’s talks. In 1891 she was described in the Pall Mall Gazette as ‘the lady to whose lectures during the last ten years the revival of popular interest in Greece is almost solely due’.

But in spite of her growing fame and the support of many archaeologists, academics and museum curators, it took Harrison a long time to secure a post at a university. In 1888 she was rejected for the chair of Classical Archaeology at University College London because it was considered ‘undesirable that any teaching in University College should be conducted by a woman’.

Harrison was 48 when she was finally offered a new three-year fellowship at her old Cambridge college, Newnham. Once she was there, students flocked to her lectures. While at Newnham she published several books; two in particular won her fame, admiration, and, in some quarters, animosity: Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and Themis. A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912).

Harrison was part of a group of classicists called The Cambridge Ritualists or the Classical Anthropologists, who were looking to establish a common root for ancient myth and ritual, and show that myth sprang from religious practices rather than from literary invention. Actions preceded words. They used contemporary anthropological, sociological and psychological theories to study ancient Greek culture and drama; Herbert Spencer, Émile Durkheim, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Henri Bergson were among the thinkers who influenced them. James Frazer’s seminal work, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1890), was of crucial significance to the Ritualists, and they in their turn influenced Frazer. The ‘eniautos daimon’, or ‘year-spirit’, was one of their key notions: she or he is the spirit of seasonal regeneration, a leader whose ritual death and rebirth injects new life into the natural world and into the community. The celebration of the life, death, and resurrection of the year-spirit, Harrison believed, is central to many religions, including those of ancient Greece.  For Harrison, the ancient Greek world was not a realm of calm, rationality and order. It was hectic and passionate. She threw a completely new light on the culture which British patriarchs traditionally saw as restrained, proportionate and masculine.

The Ritualists believed that the Greek god Dionysus (god of wine, drama, and ecstasy; and ambiguous in gender) was an example of a ‘year-spirit’. According to one myth, as an embryo in his mother’s womb Dionysus had been rescued from a conflagration by his father Zeus (ruler of the Greek gods). Zeus then sewed him into his thigh. When the time came, Dionysus had a ‘second birth’ (a kind of resurrection) from his father’s thigh. Another myth tells us that as an adult Dionysus journeyed to India, where he came close to destruction several times. But he returned to Greece in triumph, and taught the people there how to cultivate the vine.

‘It is impiety to alter the myth of your local hero, it is impossible to recast the myth of your local daimon —that is fixed forever—his conflict, his agon (struggle), his death, his pathos, his Resurrection and its heralding, his Epiphany.’
Jane Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

Harrison travelled widely in Europe, especially in Greece, sometimes sleeping under the stars. In the Greek mountains, she believed, she experienced the primitive, mysterious and transformative side of Ancient Greece.

The gardens of Fernham lay before me in the spring twilight … Somebody was in a hammock, somebody, but in this light they were phantoms only, … raced across the grass … and then on the terrace, as if popping out to breathe the air, to glance at the garden, came a bent figure, formidable yet humble, with her great forehead and her shabby dress. Could it be the famous scholar, could it be J—- H—- herself?

In her feminist classic A Room of One’s Own, the novelist Virginia Woolf awards a ghostly Harrison a cameo role, as she flits across the gardens of ‘Fernham’ (that is, Newnham) College.  Woolf wrote this in 1928, shortly after Harrison died.

At Newnham, one of Harrison’s students was the poet Hope Mirrlees.  They developed a close relationship, and lived together as partners from 1913 until Harrison’s death in 1928.

In her own life Harrison was rather like the ‘eniautos daimon’ – she always reinventing herself, always looking to the future.  She retired from Newnham in 1922, and moved to Paris with Mirrlees. There they immersed themselves in the study of the Russian language and Russian culture. They returned to London in 1925 where Harrison was able to publish her memoirs through Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s The Hogarth Press. She lived three more years, to the age of 77, and died at her house in Bloomsbury, at 11 Mecklenburgh Street, just off Meckleburgh Square.

Harrison was a suffragist – she believed in winning the vote for women by moderate, parliamentary means rather than through protest and violence. But she was a firm believer in women’s rights:

‘[The Women’s Movement] is not an attempt to arrogate man’s prerogative of manhood; it is not even an attempt to assert and emphasize women’s privilege of womanhood; it is 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.’ (Alpha and Omega)^.  

Harrison’s whole life was a testament to this meaningful struggle for space and liberty, waged on behalf of herself, the whole of womanhood, and the whole of humanity.

Sue Blundell is a writer, and for many years lectured in Classical Studies at Birkbeck University of London and at the Open University. see https:// sueblundell.com

MINI BIOGRAPHY

Education

Educated by a governess following standard girls’ curriculum: needlework, deportment, etiquette and memorising parts of the Bible, one governess introduced her to German, Latin and Greek.

1868 Went to Cheltenham Ladies’ College to study classics, one of the college’s first boarders.

1870 Obtained Hons in the University of London examination for women.

1874 Won a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge as best performing candidate at University of Cambridge General Examination for Women.

1879 Awarded a degree.

Some Key Achievements and Interests

Guided elderly ladies round the antiquities room at the British Museum, invited by Sir Charles Newton, Keeper of Greek & Roman antiquities.

Travelled the country lecturing.

Awarded honorary doctorates from University of Aberdeen (1895) and University of Durham (1897).

1898-1922  Lecturer and researcher in Classics and research fellow at Newnham.

Time and Tide described her as: ‘one woman who did not allow herself to be limited by what anyone expected of a University woman lecturer: who in that capacity dressed as she liked, theorised as she liked and taught she liked’.

Produced scholarly works bringing women back into history.

Travelled widely following archaeological digs.

Explored ancient myths highlighting the central position of women.

1926-1928  Moved to 11 Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, mixing with community of Russian political exiles.

Issues

Mother died shortly after her birth and she felt responsible for breakdown of family.

1871 Received annuity from her mother which gave her financial independence but her father was opposed to the idea of women earning money.

University of Cambridge, at the time Harrison studied there, did not allow women into the university library.

Despite her reputation, could not get prestigious jobs in her field and had to teach to support herself (Oxford High School, Notting Hill High School).

1888 Application to succeed Newton as the Yates Chair of Classical Archaeology at University College London rejected. (two of the committee signed a document stating that it was ‘undesirable that any teaching in University College should be conducted by a woman’.  (Wade, 2020 p162)

Her atheism and feminism drew strong opposition from male scholars and the press as she challenged traditional understanding of mythology and culture.

1896 Tried unsuccessfully again for post of Yates Chair of Classical Archaeology refused on the grounds that ‘she had not enjoyed the same opportunities for a thorough scholarly grounding in the details of the various branches’. (Wade, 2020 p162)

Connection to Bloomsbury

Researched at the British Museum Reading Room and conducted her ‘perambulating lectures in the museum.

Used Chenies Street Residential Chambers as her London base from 1890.

Female networks

at Newnham: Eleanor Sidgwick, Mary Paley, Pernel Strachey.

Eugénie Sellers Strong

Hope Mirrlees.

Writing/Publications include:

1903 Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion.

1912 Themis.

1925 Reminiscences of a Student’s Life autobiog published Hogarth Press.

Bibliography

Wade, Francesca; Square Hunting, London, Faber & Faber Ltd. 2020

Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) | Humanist Heritage – Exploring the rich history and influence of humanism in the UK (humanists.uk)

Further reading

Jane Harrison: https://beyond-notability.wikibase.cloud/wiki/Item:Q911