Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Jane Ellen Harrison
-
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.
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.
3: 175-6
Occupation
Virginia Woolf
The Press, which began as therapy and for the purpose of publishing the works of its owners, grew into a major engine of modern culture and thought.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Chatto and Windus.
371-3
Its political interests were served by enlightened...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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
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...
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.
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.
Timeline
No timeline events available.
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.
