Jane Ellen Harrison

Based on Wikipedia: Jane Ellen Harrison

When Jane Ellen Harrison died in 1928 at the age of seventy-seven, she left behind something rare: a completely transformed field of study. She didn't just add to classical scholarship—she fundamentally changed how we understand ancient Greek religion, shifting the focus from marble statues and epic poetry to something darker, older, and far more human: ritual.

Born in 1850 in Cottingham, Yorkshire, Harrison entered the world under a shadow. Her mother died of puerperal fever—childbed fever—shortly after giving birth. This bacterial infection, which killed countless women in the nineteenth century, left Jane motherless from her first breath. Her father, a timber merchant, hired a series of governesses to raise her.

A Mind Built for Languages

Those governesses taught her German, Latin, Ancient Greek, and Hebrew. But Harrison didn't stop there. She eventually learned about sixteen languages, including Russian. This wasn't mere academic collecting. Each language opened a window into a different way of thinking about the world, a different cultural logic.

She studied at Cheltenham Ladies' College and then, in 1874, continued at Newnham College, Cambridge—one of the new progressive colleges for women. This was radical. Women couldn't actually earn degrees from Cambridge at the time. They could study, they could sit examinations, they could do all the intellectual work. But the university wouldn't grant them the credential.

Harrison didn't let this stop her. Between 1880 and 1897, she studied Greek art and archaeology at the British Museum under Sir Charles Newton. She supported herself by lecturing—at the museum, at schools, mostly private boys' schools. Her lectures became wildly popular. When she spoke in Glasgow about Athenian gravestones, sixteen hundred people showed up.

The Professional Who Shouldn't Have Existed

Mary Beard, the contemporary classicist, called Harrison "the first woman in England to become an academic, in the fully professional sense—an ambitious, full-time, salaried, university researcher and lecturer." This distinction matters. There had been learned women before, women who wrote and studied. But Harrison was something new: a career academic who happened to be female, in an era when such a thing wasn't supposed to exist.

In 1888, she began publishing in The Woman's World, a periodical edited by Oscar Wilde. Her topic: the pictures of Sappho, the ancient Greek poet from Lesbos. She translated works from French, provided commentary on Pausanias. Her scholarship earned her honorary degrees from Durham in 1897 and Aberdeen in 1895—recognition that actually meant something, since Cambridge still wouldn't grant her a real one.

She applied for the Yates Professorship of Classical Art and Archaeology at University College London in 1895. The hiring committee recommended her. But Flinders Petrie blocked the appointment, arguing that while Harrison knew religion, she lacked the broader knowledge base of the male candidate, Ernest Gardner. Gardner got the job and worked with Petrie for thirty years.

Love and Loss

Harrison was engaged to marry the scholar R. A. Neil. Then he died suddenly of appendicitis in 1901, before they could marry. Appendicitis—today a routine surgery, then a death sentence if it ruptured.

She later became close to Francis MacDonald Cornford, another classicist. When he married in 1909, she was devastated. She then formed a deep friendship with Hope Mirrlees, whom she called her "spiritual daughter." When Harrison retired from Newnham in 1922, she moved to Paris to live with Mirrlees. They returned to London in 1925, where Harrison published her memoirs through Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press.

Virginia Woolf herself was influenced by Harrison's work. In "A Room of One's Own," published in 1929, Woolf refers to "the famous scholar, could it be J---- H---- herself?" The initials separated by long dashes—a gesture of discretion, or perhaps of reverence.

The Ritualist Revolution

But Harrison's real legacy wasn't in her personal life. It was in her ideas. She became the central figure of what became known as the Cambridge Ritualists, a group that included Cornford and others. Their approach was revolutionary: they argued that Greek religion couldn't be understood by reading Homer and looking at beautiful statues. You had to dig deeper, into the primitive rituals that predated the classical age.

Her 1903 book, "Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion," laid out the method. Start with ritual, not myth. "In theology facts are harder to seek, truth more difficult to formulate than in ritual." She analyzed Athenian festivals: the Anthesteria, harvest festivals like the Thargelia, women's festivals like the Skirophoria and Haloa. In these festivals, she detected what she called "primitive survivals"—traces of much older religious practices, older ways of thinking about the sacred.

This approach drew on Charles Darwin's work, filtered through the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor and his 1871 book "Primitive Culture." The idea was cultural evolution: that you could trace religious practices back through stages of development, from primitive to sophisticated. It was a very nineteenth-century idea, and modern scholars have complicated it considerably. But at the time, it opened up entirely new ways of reading ancient texts.

From Ritual to Myth

Harrison's key insight was that myth follows ritual, not the other way around. The Greeks didn't perform rituals because they believed the myths. They created the myths to explain rituals they were already performing—rituals whose original meanings had been forgotten.

Think of it this way: imagine a community that lights candles every winter solstice. Over generations, they forget why they started doing this. So they invent a story: they're welcoming back the sun god, who was kidnapped by the darkness. The story makes sense of the ritual. But the ritual came first.

This might seem obvious now, but it was revolutionary then. Classical scholarship had focused on the literary texts—Homer, Hesiod, the tragedians. Harrison said: look at what people actually did. Look at the vase paintings, which show scenes that don't appear in any surviving text. Look at the festivals, the weird ones that seem barbaric or nonsensical. Those are windows into something older and stranger than the polished literary tradition.

Darwin, Dogma, and Mysticism

Harrison was an atheist. But she had a complicated relationship with religion. In her 1909 essay "The Influence of Darwinism on the Study of Religion," she wrote something remarkable: "Every dogma religion has hitherto produced is probably false, but for all that the religious or mystical spirit may be the only way of apprehending some things, and these of enormous importance."

She continues: these mystical apprehensions "cannot be put into language without being falsified and misstated, that they have rather to be felt and lived than uttered and intellectually analyzed; yet they are somehow true and necessary to life."

This is a profound paradox. Religion is false, but necessary. Its claims are untrue, but it accesses truths that cannot be accessed any other way. This isn't the strident atheism of Richard Dawkins. It's something more subtle: a recognition that human beings need myth and ritual, even if—especially if—we don't believe the literal content.

Suffrage and Humanity

Harrison supported women's suffrage, though she said she personally would never want to vote. This sounds contradictory, but it reflects her broader philosophy. The women's movement, she argued, "is not an attempt to arrogate man's prerogative of manhood; it is not even an attempt to assert and emphasize women's privilege of womanhood; it is simply the demand that in the life of woman, as in the life of man, space and liberty shall be found for a thing bigger than either manhood or womanhood—for humanity."

Her motto came from the Roman playwright Terence: "Homo sum; humani nihil mihi alienum est." I am a human being; nothing that is human do I account alien. Not "I am a woman," but "I am a human." The point was universality, not difference.

She applied her anthropological scholarship to the suffrage question. Rather than protesting, she used her academic authority to argue that denying women the vote had no basis in human nature or cultural evolution. It was simply arbitrary prejudice.

The Great War and After

World War I broke something in Harrison. She held pacifist views, which isolated her in a climate of jingoistic nationalism. After the war, she never visited Italy or Greece again. These places had been central to her intellectual life—sites of archaeological discovery, living museums of ancient culture. But the war made travel feel wrong, or perhaps impossible.

She mostly wrote revisions of earlier work, synopses, summaries. The creative fire had dimmed. When she retired in 1922, she briefly lived in Paris with Hope Mirrlees. But her health began to fail. She returned to London, living at 11 Mecklenburgh Square on the fringes of Bloomsbury.

She died there in 1928 and was buried in St. Marylebone Cemetery, East Finchley.

Doppelgängers and Directions

Harrison's friendship with Eugénie Sellers Strong ended dramatically in the 1890s. Mary Beard has explored this relationship in detail. After the breakup, the two women moved in opposite directions—chronologically opposite, that is. Sellers became an authority on Imperial Rome, studying later periods, more sophisticated material culture. Harrison dug deeper into primitive Greece, into the ritual origins of drama, into the dark and archaic.

But despite moving in opposite temporal directions, they were intellectual doppelgängers. Same concerns, same style, same forms of argument. They were both practitioners of what became known as "classical anthropology"—the application of evolutionary anthropology to the study of ancient Mediterranean cultures.

Ellen Wordsworth Crofts, who later became the second wife of Sir Francis Darwin (Charles Darwin's son), was Harrison's best friend from student days at Newnham. Their friendship lasted from 1898 until Ellen's death in 1903. These relationships—intense, intellectually charged friendships with other women—were central to Harrison's life and work.

Legacy and Erasure

Harrison's work influenced T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Hilda Doolittle. Her ideas about ritual, about the primitive origins of art and religion, shaped modernist literature's obsession with myth and archetype. She was formative to the Cambridge Ritualists, a group that changed how we read ancient texts.

But her legacy has been contested. The critic Camille Paglia argues that second-wave feminists ignored Harrison because her findings didn't fit their narrative. Paglia claims that feminists effaced the careers of prominent pre-World War II female scholars to bolster claims of male domination in academia. Whether or not this is fair, it's true that Harrison was under-discussed for decades.

Tina Passman, in a 1993 article, tied this neglect to the unpopularity of lesbian perspectives in classical studies. Harrison's relationships with women, her unmarried status, her "spiritual daughter"—these aspects of her life made her uncomfortable to claim, even for scholars who admired her work.

Mary Beard's 2000 biography, "The Invention of Jane Harrison," and several other recent studies have revived interest in her life and work. But it's striking that someone so influential could be so thoroughly forgotten.

What She Changed

Before Harrison, classical scholarship was primarily textual and aesthetic. Scholars read Homer, analyzed the structure of tragedies, cataloged statues and vases. Harrison said: this is not enough. You have to understand what people actually believed and did. You have to take seriously the weird stuff—the fertility rituals, the ecstatic dancing, the sacrifices that seemed barbaric even to classical Athenians.

Her method—proceeding from ritual to myth—became standard. So did her use of archaeological evidence to interpret religion. So did her attention to women's festivals and cults, which had been largely ignored by male scholars focused on the Olympian gods and heroic warfare.

She also demonstrated that a woman could be a serious, rigorous, professional scholar. Not a dilettante, not an enthusiast, but a career academic producing original research that changed her field. In an era when this was supposed to be impossible, she did it anyway.

Harrison's first major work, published in 1882, argued that Homer's Odyssey and Greek vase paintings drew on similar deep mythological sources. This was not a common opinion. Most scholars treated vase paintings as illustrations of known myths. Harrison insisted they had their own logic, their own commentary on ritual and belief.

Her later works—"Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion" (1903), "Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion" (1912), "Ancient Art and Ritual" (1913), and "Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion" (1921)—built an entire architecture of interpretation. These weren't just books. They were a new way of seeing the ancient world.

The Human Behind the Scholar

In 1925, Harrison published her memoirs, "Reminiscences of a Student's Life," through the Woolfs' Hogarth Press. She also wrote a collection of essays called "Alpha and Omega" in 1915, during the war. These personal writings reveal someone deeply concerned with what it means to be human, to grow old, to face mortality.

She lived through an extraordinary period of change. Born in 1850, she came of age in the Victorian era, when women were supposed to be domestic angels. She died in 1928, having seen women's suffrage achieved in Britain, having lived through the first mechanized total war, having witnessed the birth of modernism in art and literature.

She mastered sixteen languages not because she was collecting accomplishments, but because she genuinely wanted to understand how different cultures thought. She studied ancient Greek religion not to confirm her atheism, but because she believed these old rituals contained truths about human nature that philosophy and science couldn't fully capture.

She never married—her fiancé died before the wedding—and formed her deepest bonds with other women. She moved to Paris with her "spiritual daughter" after retirement, lived on the edge of Bloomsbury, published with the Woolfs. She existed in networks of artistic and intellectual women at a time when such networks were both necessary and suspect.

Growing Old

Harrison's final years were marked by physical decline but continued intellectual engagement. She returned from Paris to London when her health failed. She lived at Mecklenburgh Square, close enough to the Bloomsbury set to participate in that world, but peripheral to it.

She was seventy-seven when she died. Not ancient by our standards, but a full life by the standards of her era. She had survived childhood without a mother, adolescence without formal schooling until her teens, young adulthood in an academic world that didn't want her. She had created a career that wasn't supposed to exist, produced scholarship that changed her field, influenced artists and writers whose work would define modernism.

And yet, she was forgotten. Or half-forgotten. Remembered by specialists, obscure to everyone else. It took decades for scholars to rediscover her, to recognize what she had accomplished.

Perhaps this is fitting for someone who spent her life studying the primitive survivals in Greek religion—the traces of older beliefs that persisted in fragmentary, half-understood forms. Harrison herself became a kind of primitive survival, a trace of an earlier moment in feminist intellectual history, waiting to be excavated and understood anew.

Her motto—nothing human is alien to me—was both scholarly method and personal philosophy. She studied the strangest, most barbaric aspects of Greek religion because she believed they revealed something essential about human nature. She insisted on her own humanity, her right to intellectual life, at a time when women were denied that right.

Jane Ellen Harrison didn't just study the past. She changed how we understand it, and in doing so, she changed what was possible in the present. That's a rare achievement, and one worth remembering.