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Jane Ellen Harrison | |
|---|---|
 1925 portrait of Harrison byThéo van Rysselberghe | |
| Born | (1850-09-09)9 September 1850 Cottingham, Yorkshire, England |
| Died | 15 April 1928(1928-04-15) (aged 77) Bloomsbury, England |
| Resting place | St Marylebone cemetery,East Finchley |
| Alma mater | Cheltenham Ladies' College;Newnham College,Cambridge |
| Occupation(s) | Classicist andlinguist |
| Organization(s) | Lecturer,Newnham College, 1898–1922 |
| Known for | One of the founders of modern studies inGreek mythology |
| Awards | Two honorary doctorates, anLLD fromUniversity of Aberdeen in 1895 andDLitt from theUniversity of Durham in 1897. |
Jane Ellen Harrison (9 September 1850 – 15 April 1928) was a Britishclassical scholar andlinguist. WithKarl Kerenyi andWalter Burkert, Harrison is one of the founders of modern studies inAncient Greek religion andmythology. She applied 19th-centuryarchaeological discoveries to the interpretation of ancient Greek religion in ways that have become standard. She has also been credited with being the first woman to obtain a post in England as a 'career academic'.[1][2][3] Harrison argued forwomen's suffrage but thought she would never want tovote herself.[4]Ellen Wordsworth Crofts, later second wife of SirFrancis Darwin, was Jane Harrison's best friend from her student days at Newnham, and during the period from 1898 to Ellen's death in 1903. The depth and influence of Harrison’s friendship withEugénie Sellers Strong—ended by a dramatic breech in the 1890s—is explored in a monograph byMary Beard:[5] after their breakup Sellers became an influential authority on the material culture of Imperial Rome, while Harrison’s work dug deeper and deeper into the primitive ritual origins of Greek drama.[5] Though moving in different directions chronologically, in terms of their focus, the women appear otherwise as doppelgängers of one another in their concerns, style and characteristic forms of argument deriving from an approach that became known asclassical anthropology.[5] Harrison’s Prolegomena to Greek Religion had a compelling and inspirational impact on the later artworks ofT. S. Eliot,Virginia Woolf, andHilda Doolittle and her scholarly legerdemain was formative to the group of classicists known as theCambridge ritualists.[6]
Harrison was born inCottingham, Yorkshire on 9 September 1850 to Charles and Elizabeth Harrison.[7] Her father was a timber merchant.[8] Her mother died ofpuerperal fever[7] shortly after she was born and she was educated by a series ofgovernesses.[9] Her governesses taught her German,Latin,Ancient Greek andHebrew, but she later expanded her knowledge to about sixteen languages, includingRussian.
Harrison spent most of her professional life atNewnham College, the progressive, recently established college for women atCambridge. Mary Beard 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".[10]
Between 1880 and 1897, Harrison studied Greek art and archaeology at theBritish Museum underSir Charles Newton.[11] Harrison then supported herself lecturing at the museum and at schools (mostly private boy's schools).[12]
Her lectures became widely popular and 1,600 people ended up attending her Glasgow lecture on Athenian gravestones. She travelled to Italy and Germany, where she met the scholar from Prague,Wilhelm Klein. Klein introduced her toWilhelm Dörpfeld who invited her to participate in his archaeological tours in Greece. Her early bookThe Odyssey in Art and Literature then appeared in 1882. In 1888, she began to publish in the periodical thatOscar Wilde was editing calledThe Woman's World on "The Pictures of Sappho". She ended up translatingMythologie figurée de la Grèce (1883) byMaxime Collignon as well as providing personal commentary to selections ofPausanias, Mythology & Monuments of Ancient Athens byMargaret Verrall in the same year. These two major works caused Harrison to be awarded honorary degrees from the universities ofDurham (1897) andAberdeen (1895).
Harrison was engaged to marry the scholarR. A. Neil, but he died suddenly ofappendicitis in 1901 before they could marry.[13][14]
Harrison became the central figure of the group known as theCambridge Ritualists. In 1903, her bookProlegomena on the Study of Greek Religion appeared. Harrison became close toFrancis MacDonald Cornford (1874–1943), and when he married in 1909 she became extremely upset. She then made a new friendship withHope Mirrlees, whom she referred to as her "spiritual daughter".[citation needed]
Harrison retired from Newnham in 1922 and then moved to Paris to live with Mirrlees. She and Mirrlees returned to London in 1925 where she was able to publish her memoirs throughLeonard andVirginia Woolf's press,The Hogarth Press. She died at age 77 at her home inBloomsbury. She was buried inSt Marylebone Cemetery,East Finchley.[15]
Harrison was anatheist.[16][17]
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Harrison was, at leastideologically, a moderatesuffragist. Rather than support women'ssuffrage by protesting, Harrison applied her scholarship inanthropology to defend women's right to vote. In responding to ananti-suffragist critic, Harrison demonstrates this moderate ideology:
[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. (84–85,Alpha and Omega)[18]
To this end, Harrison's motto wasTerence'shomo sum; humani nihil mihi alienum est ("I am a human being; nothing that is human do I account alien.")
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Harrison began formal study atCheltenham Ladies' College, where she gained a Certificate, and, in 1874, continued her studies inthe classics atCambridge University'sNewnham College. Her early work earned Harrison two honorary doctorates, anLLD fromUniversity of Aberdeen in 1895, andDLitt from theUniversity of Durham in 1897. This recognition afforded Harrison the opportunity to return toNewnham College as a lecturer in 1898, and her position was renewed continuously until Harrison retired in 1922. She had been a candidate for theYates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology atUniversity College London afterReginald Stuart Poole had died in 1895.[19] The hiring committee had recommended Harrison to the position, but that decision was blocked byFlinders Petrie in favor ofErnest Gardner. Petrie argued that while Harrison was an expert on religion, she did not have the knowledge base Gardner did, so he got the job and worked closely with Petrie for 30 years.[19]
Harrison's first monograph, in 1882, drew on the thesis that bothHomer'sOdyssey andmotifs of the Greek vase-painters were drawing upon similar deep sources for mythology, the opinion that had not been common in earlier classical archaeology, that the repertory of vase-painters offered some unusual commentaries on myth and ritual. Her approach in her great work,Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903),[20] was to proceed from the ritual to the myth it inspired: "In theology facts are harder to seek, truth more difficult to formulate than in ritual."[21] Thus she began her book with analyses of the best-known of theAthenian festivals:Anthesteria, harvest festivalsThargelia,Kallynteria [de],Plynteria, and thewomen's festivals, in which she detected many primitive survivals,Skirophoria,Stenia andHaloa.
Harrison alluded to and commented on the cultural applications ofCharles Darwin's work. Harrison and her generation depended upon anthropologistEdward Burnett Tylor (who was himself influenced by Darwin and evolutionary ideas) for some new themes ofcultural evolution, especially his 1871 work,Primitive Culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom. After asocially Darwinian analysis of theorigins of religion, Harrison argues that religiosity isanti-intellectual anddogmatic, yet she defended the cultural necessity of religion and mysticism. In her essayThe Influence of Darwinism on the Study of Religion (1909), Harrison concluded:
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. It may also be that the contents of this mystical apprehension cannot be put into language without being falsified and misstated, that they have rather to be felt and lived than uttered and intellectually analyzed; yet they are somehow true and necessary to life. (176,Alpha and Omega[22])
World War I marked a deep break in Harrison's life. Harrison never visited Italy orGreece after the war: she mostly wrote revisions or synopses of previous publications, andpacifist leanings isolated her. Upon retiring (in 1922), Harrison briefly lived in Paris, but she returned to London when her health began to fail. During the last two years of her life Harrison was living at 11Mecklenburgh Square on the fringes of Bloomsbury.[23]
InA Room of One's Own (1929), in addition to female authors,Virginia Woolf also discusses and draws inspiration from Harrison. Harrison is presented in the essay only by her initials separated by long dashes, and Woolf first introduces Harrison as "the famous scholar, could it be J---- H---- herself?"[24]
The criticCamille Paglia (see Paglia's 1990 bookSexual Personae (passim), and the long essay "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf" in Paglia'sSex, Art and American Culture: New Essays, 1993) has written of Harrison's influence on her own work. Paglia argues that Harrison's career has been ignored bysecond-wave feminists, who Paglia thinks object to Harrison's findings and efface the careers of prominent pre–World War II female scholars to bolster their claims of male domination in academia.
Tina Passman, in 1993 in her article "Out of the Closet and into the Field: Matriculture, the Lesbian Perspective, and Feminist Classics", discussed the neglect of Harrison by the academy, and tied that neglect to an unpopularity of lesbian perspectives in the field.[25][26]
Mary Beard's numerous essays and her book on Harrison's life, (The Invention of Jane Harrison, Harvard University Press, 2000), as well as several other biographies of Harrison, have moved the needle toward greater appreciation of Harrison's achievements, as well as further understanding of the context in which she worked.
Books on the anthropological search for the origins of Greek religion and mythology, include:
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Works by or aboutJane Ellen Harrison atWikisource
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