Alpha and Omega

Published at the outset of World War I, Alpha and Omega was the capstone of the remarkable career of Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick Cambridge classicist and celebrity public intellectual who became famous for her fearlessness and sparkling wit, and whose insights reshaped our understanding of ancient Greek culture. But her far-ranging mind did not limit itself to the ancients: throughout her career, Harrison gave wildly popular lectures on topics as varied as paganism, evolution, modern art, and women’s suffrage.

As Harrison notes in the lead essay of this collection, humorously titled “Crabbed Age and Youth,” there is often great friction between the young and the old, but this friction can, “if rightly understood and considerately handled on both sides, take the form of mutual stimulus and attraction.” This balancing of seemingly irreconcilable antagonists—of alpha and omega—threads its way through the essays collected here in ways that feel just as fresh, surprising, and brilliant as when they were written, inviting us to think about think about the seemingly irreconcilable conflicts of our own era in new ways.

About Marginalian Editions

Marginalian Editions is a collaboration between Sarah McNally of McNally Jackson Books and writer Maria Popova, who selects and introduces forgotten masterworks that deserve a second life—uncommon books at the intersection of wonder and our search for meaning, from science and philosophy to poetry and children’s literature.

“No one has approached the universal problem of advancing from youth to old age, or the dialogue between the two within a lifetime and across generations, more insightfully, delightfully, and with richer nuance than the great classics scholar and linguist Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928) . . . whose work revolutionized the modern understanding of Ancient Greek culture by upending millennia of patriarchal revisionism with [her] discovery of an entire class of ‘matriarchal, husbandless goddesses’ central to community life and ritual.”

—Maria Popova, The Marginalian

“Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick Cambridge classicist and celebrity public intellectual . . . cultivated a distinctive brand of quirky and memorable outspokenness . . . with her sparky wit and refusal to be silenced . . . She remains my hero . . . She has remained the iron in my soul.”

—Mary Beard, London Review of Books

“When I compare . . . Jane Grey with Jane Harrison, the advance in intellectual power seems to me not only sensible but immense; the comparison with men not in the least one that inclines me to suicide; and the effects of education and liberty scarcely to be overrated.”

—Virginia Woolf, The New Statesman

“She wrote with a pathos and engagement rare among her academic peers, and her whole approach to the classics . . . seemed to open up new worlds of thought and feeling . . . One [has] to admire the passion and restless originality of her mind and the fructifying influence of her work on other writers.”

—Roger Kimball, The New Criterion

Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928) was born and raised in Yorkshire, England, the daughter of a prosperous timber broker; her mother died soon after she was born. Educated at home as a child, Harrison enrolled in 1874 in the newly established Newnham College for women, at Cambridge University, where she later taught. In 1903 Harrison published her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, followed in 1912 by Themis, works that synthesized new developments in archaeology and anthropology and helped revolutionize the study of ancient Greek civilization. A popular lecturer whose articles enjoyed a wide readership, Harrison retired from teaching in 1922 and spent her last years in Paris with her “spiritual daughter,” the poet Hope Mirrlees.

Maria Popova is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the outgrown name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials, author of Figuring, editor of A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, and maker of The Universe in Verse — a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry.

Alpha and Omega • Hardcover ISBN: 9781961341418

Jun 3, 2025 • Marginalian Editions

6" x 8.5" • 272 pages • $28.00

eBook ISBN: 9781961341425