Jane Ellen Harrison

09 September 1850 - 15 April 1928

Standard Name: Harrison, Jane Ellen

Birth Name: Jane Ellen Harrison

Classics scholar JEH devoted much of her career to radically unorthodox studies of the development of ritual and religion in early Greek culture. Her findings, issuing in both monographs and articles, were highly publicized and often controversial during her own time, but fell into neglect before receiving sharply increased attention from the late 1980s forward. As recent studies have demonstrated, it is difficult to overestimate the impact of Harrison's work on her specific scholarly field (Greek ritual, art, and myth), on women in academia, or on a range of creative writers. She also published a personal memoir.

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Connections

Connections	Author name Sort descending	Excerpt
Education	Emma Frances Brooke	Newnham College opened in September 1871 with Anne Jemima Clough as its principal, and with five pioneering students: Mary Paley (later Marshall , who encouraged Jane Ellen Harrison to follow her to Newnham), Edith Creak
Travel	Dorothy Bussy	Another who attended these conferences, though in different years, was the classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison .
Textual Features	Mary Butts	This essay explores the disintegration of religion in the Western world, not a change in practice, but in sensibility. A moral temperature, not a protest, but an indifference. Butts, Mary. Traps for Unbelievers. Desmond Harmsworth. 6 Critic Jane Garrity has noted the...
Occupation	Frances Cornford	Because the play was staged out of term, women were able to participate. Jane Harrison (who knew Frances well, and had been an intimate friend of her mother) recruited several women from Newnham College as...
Family and Intimate relationships	Frances Cornford	She was the first among the young Darwin women to be married. Raverat, Gwen. Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood. Faber and Faber. 282 She had been introduced to Francis Cornford the previous year by Jane Harrison , who knew Frances well, had been an intimate...
Textual Production	Sir James George Frazer	The Golden Bough, a comparative study of human beliefs from the earliest times, had a major influence on modernist writings. SJGF 's text outlines an evolving belief system, which moves from magic, to religion...
Education	Constance Garnett	She later recorded that she occasionally saw the great Miss Harrison—who, however had no active connection with Newnham at this date, since she had graduated, and was not yet a Fellow. Constance reached the...
Education	Mary Agnes Hamilton	Women were permitted to attend lectures at Kiel only by express permission from each professor involved. Mary Agnes improved her German, learned a great deal about ancient Greece, and also saw productions of most of...
Instructor	Mary Agnes Hamilton	During her studies at Cambridge, MAH met Lady Burne-Jones , who read to her from the letters of her husband Edward Burne-Jones and of William Morris as well as the poetry of Morris . She...
Friends, Associates	Vernon Lee	Back in Italy after the end of the First World War, VL continued to read widely. She returned to Dante , Shakespeare , and Goethe . She introduced herself to newer writings on philosophy, science...
politics	Marie Belloc Lowndes	The letter challenged a recent antisuffragist manifesto, and stressed three points from Prime Minister Asquith 's statement to suffragists of 14 August. The points were that women had rendered as effective service to their country...
Education	Hope Mirrlees	HM returned to France in early 1915, when she and Jane Harrison spent several months in Paris: they lived at the Hôtel de l'Élysée and studied Russian at the École des Langues Orientales . (...
Travel	Hope Mirrlees	HM returned from Paris to England in 1926, via Provence and Burgundy with Harrison , who was by now in very bad health.
Literary responses	Hope Mirrlees	But it has generally been read with less attention to its abstract meaning, as a covert treatment of the possible lesbian relationship between the author and Jane Harrison . Virginia Woolf had read it by...
Literary responses	Hope Mirrlees	Julia Briggs reads the text as a roman à clef in which Scudéry is an unflattering portrait of Natalie Barney (whom HM would have encountered when herself living in Paris) while Harrison appears as the...

Timeline

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Texts

Harrison, Jane Ellen. Alpha and Omega. Sidgwick and Jackson, 1915.

Harrison, Jane Ellen. Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Cambridge University Press, 1921.

Harrison, Jane Ellen. Introductory Studies in Greek Art. T. Fisher Unwin, 1885.

Harrison, Jane Ellen, and Pausanias. Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens. Translator Verrall, Margaret, Macmillan, 1890.

Harrison, Jane Ellen. Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature. Rivington, 1882.

Harrison, Jane Ellen. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Cambridge University Press, 1903.

Harrison, Jane Ellen. Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. Hogarth Press, 1925.

Garnett, Ray. The Book of the Bear. Translators Harrison, Jane Ellen and Hope Mirrlees, Nonesuch, 1926.

Mirsky, Dimitri Svyatopolk. The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum by Himself. Translators Harrison, Jane Ellen and Hope Mirrlees, L. and V. Woolf, 1924.

Harrison, Jane Ellen. Themis. Cambridge University Press, 1912.