Jane Ellen Harrison

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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.
Photograph of a drawing of Jane Ellen Harrison. She is shown from the shoulders up, wearing a cloak covering her head, with a bit of light wavy hair showing around her face, and a serious expression on her face.

Connections

Connections Author name 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, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
3: 200
(though in fact both of her parents were Scots). She converted to Roman Catholicism in the late 1920s....
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, 2000.
153
Most of HM 's...
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, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
3: 3 and n3
HM dedicated the novel in finished form to her...
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 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 . (...
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...
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
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...
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, 1977.
282
She had been introduced to Francis Cornford the previous year by Jane Harrison , who knew Frances well, had been an intimate...
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...
Friends, Associates Virginia Woolf
While woolgathering for her upcoming Women and Fiction lectures at Cambridge , VW met with Jane Ellen Harrison for the last time; in her diary she described her as very aged & rather exalted.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Editors Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press, 1977–1984, 5 vols.
3: 175-6
Friends, Associates Virginia Woolf
The classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison made a great impact on Woolf's views on women in scholarship and women in history. The Hogarth Press published her Reminiscences of a Student's Life, 1925.
Friends, Associates Julia Strachey
Shortly after the wedding, Julia became the charge of Alys Russell , a suffrage and temperance activist who was also the aunt of Ray (Costelloe) Strachey , sister of writer Logan Pearsall Smith and Mary Berenson
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...

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.