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
Cultural formation	Hope Mirrlees	HM was born into a wealthy business family which struck Virginia Woolf as typical[ly] English Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press. 3: 200 (though in fact both of her parents were Scots). She converted to Roman Catholicism in the late 1920s....
Family and Intimate relationships	Hope Mirrlees	Soon after HM arrived at Newnham , she and Harrison began to develop a personal relationship. Frequently corresponding by letter whether they were both present in Cambridge or not, the two formulated an exclusive, fantastic...
Family and Intimate relationships	Hope Mirrlees	Apart from this unusual communcation, HM and Harrison studied and published, travelled, and lived together for nearly two decades. Harrison was nursed by HM through her last illness and after her death in 1928, Mirrlees...
Cultural formation	Hope Mirrlees	Jane Harrison is the only intimate companion linked to HM by current critics or historians. Mary Beard notes that Mirrlees was talked about in ways that pointed to her homosexuality. Beard, Mary. The Invention of Jane Harrison. Harvard University Press. 153 Most of HM 's...
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...
Dedications	Hope Mirrlees	Virginia Woolf had asked by letter in January 1923: Are you writing your book again? I very much want to read it. Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press. 3: 3 and n3 HM dedicated the novel in finished form to her...
Textual Production	Hope Mirrlees	HM worked all through her later years on a biography of Jane Harrison . She never completed it, partly from indecision as to how much of Harrison's private life to reveal. The text is now...
Education	Willa Muir	She had also studied English and modern history during her degree. In her first year she discovered Jane Ellen Harrison 's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903). Harrison's work, which suggests that the...
Intertextuality and Influence	Ann Quin	Taking place in an unidentified Mediterranean country with growing political repression, the novel concerns a couple, a man and a woman, the latter of whom is searching for her possibly dead brother. Passages was AQ
Reception	Laura Riding	Miranda Seymour (who has published a life of Graves and a novel based on an incident in his life and Riding's) does not believe this story of indebtedness, Seymour, Miranda. “The Hand from the Grave”. Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales, edited by Mark Bostridge, Continuum, pp. 191-5. 192 and nor does Riding's biographer Friedmann...
Textual Production	Nan Shepherd	After her retirement from teaching in 1956, while editing the Aberdeen University Review, NS contributed to it articles on such literary figures as Hugh McDiarmid and Agnes Mure Mackenzie , and on the history...
politics	May Sinclair	Unlike many suffragists, MS was a decided supporter of the war. With three other women (Jane Ellen Harrison , Flora Annie Steel , and Mary Augusta Ward ) she signed the Authors' Declaration to...

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