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.
Beard, Mary. The Invention of Jane Harrison. Harvard University Press.
132-5
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Author summary
Hope Mirrlees
Much of the sparse information currently available on HM
focuses on her lasting personal relationship with eminent scholar Jane Harrison
rather than her own body of writing, which includes poetry, novels, and biographies (published and...
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 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.
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...
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...
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...