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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...

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.