A Life Lived with Intensity and Brilliance: Daniel Mendelsohn on Jane Ellen Harrison
Reminiscences of a Student’s Life focuses on the dazzling highlights of a life lived with intensity and brilliance: the chit-chat with crowned heads, the amusing, ever-so-slightly self-deprecating anecdotes that nonetheless sneakily illuminate either her independence of mind or her personal glamor, the intellectual enthusiasms, evoked with such memorable and even touching energy and candor.
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Excerpted from Reminiscences of a Student's Life
Virginia Woolf begins A Room of One’s Own with a poetic evocation of the idyllic setting in which the idea for an extended rumination about women and literature first came to her: the bucolic surroundings of Newnham College, Cambridge. There, late in 1928, she delivered the two lectures that eventually became her book. In her text, Woolf assumes a new, rather more generic name (“Mary Beton, Mary Seton . . . it is not a matter of the least importance”) and likewise rechristens Newnham itself, which becomes “Fernham.” From the fictionalized college’s lush landscape, with its “golden and crimson” bushes, the willows weeping “in perpetual lamentation,” the “sky and bridge and burning tree,” “Mary” proceeds to a luncheon party in the college rooms, where she finds it hard not to feel the presence of eminent literary ghosts. Later, as she looks out over the college gardens, the languorous mood is suddenly interrupted:
and then on the terrace, as if popping out to breathe the air, to glance at the garden, came a bent figure, formidable yet humble, with her great forehead and her shabby dress—could it be the famous scholar, could it be J—— H—— herself?
At this point in Woolf’s text, the modern reader of A Room of One’s Own is likely to feel the need for a footnote explaining the identity of J—— H—— . But in the autumn of 1928, the average reader would have had no trouble recognizing the cryptic apparition flitting across Woolf’s pages as Jane Harrison. Harrison, after all, was the eminent Cambridge classicist whose studies of Greek religion revolutionized the way scholars thought about Classical antiquity; more to the point, her popular lectures throughout the United Kingdom, complete with colorful slides and eerie sound effects, had made her one of the first “public intellectuals” of modern times. Six months before Woolf delivered her Cambridge lectures, Harrison, who had been educated at Newnham and spent much of her professional life there, had died, aged seventy-seven; Woolf herself, accompanied by her husband, Leonard, had attended the funeral.
That the ghost of Jane Harrison haunts, both literally and figuratively, the pages of Woolf’s seminal feminist essay is no accident. Apart from her other accomplishments and innovations, Harrison was a pioneer female scholar: in the words of the British classicist Mary Beard, she was “the first woman to become an academic, in the fully professional sense—an ambitious, full-time, salaried, university researcher and lecturer” (Beard, a public intellectual very much in the Harrison mold, credits the earlier scholar with having made her own career possible). Harrison’s evolution from a mid-Victorian beauty who had posed for Pre-Raphaelite painters to a groundbreaking heroine of intellectual life well into the Jazz Age—her fellow Yorkshireman, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, considered her the most “distinguished woman scholar in the word”—traces an arc that mirrors the evolution of feminism itself. What better ghost, then, for Woolf to have been visited by as she sat down to write A Room of One’s Own—a text, indeed, that one biographer has described as being Woolf’s “memorial to her dead friend”?
Not, of course, that Harrison needed anyone to speak for her. Famously voluble and, when necessary, contentious, she was a riveting, theatrical presence possessed of an impressive self-confidence. One of the anecdotes that classicists like to repeat about her concerns a testy encounter between Harrison, only an undergraduate at the time, and the former Prime Minister William Gladstone, whose daughter Helen was the frenemy of Harrison’s school days (“a friendly enemy,” as Harrison later put it). During a visit to Newnham, the great man had asked the young woman who her favorite Greek author was. “Tact counselled Homer,” as Harrison would later recall, referring to the most august of Greek poets, “but I was perverse.” And so she retorted that she preferred the darkly ironic skeptic, Euripides. Disgusted, Gladstone left soon after.
This and other entertaining tales, many of them no doubt tall, are recounted by Harrison in Reminiscences of a Student’s Life, the breezy and highly entertaining memoir she published in 1925. For all its dazzle and charm, however, the book gives a powerful sense of what made its author at once so fascinating and so important.
The spiky intelligence and sometimes discomfiting curiosity were evident from the start. Jane Ellen Harrison was born in Yorkshire in 1850, into a family that she describes as being “singularly provincial and old-fashioned even for those days.” Her mother died soon after giving birth to Jane, and as a little girl Harrison found scant comfort in her father’s second wife, her former governess and an Evangelical Christian whose religion, Harrison writes in Reminiscences, “was of the fervent semi-revivalist type.” Her father, by contrast, a comfortably well-off timber merchant, was a deeply shy man “incapable of formulating a conviction.” It is tempting to see, in the tension between the laissez-faire father and the fervent mother, not only the origins of Harrison’s lifelong preoccupation with religion, but her overall approach to the subject, at once skeptical and sympathetic. “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 wrote in Alpha and Omega, a 1915 collection of essays and lectures.
Harrison’s recollections of her childhood experience of attending church and, later, of teaching Sunday School reveal a preternaturally gifted youngster already casting a cool eye on the activities around her. “I was from the outset a hopeless worldling,” she recalled in Reminiscences,
But the apparatus of religion interested me. I followed the prayers in Latin, and the lesson in German, and the Gospel in Greek; this with some misgivings as to the ‘whole-heartedness’ of the proceedings.
Harrison “went up,” as the British say, to Cambridge in 1874, at the age of twenty-four, to study at Newnham; the all-women’s college had only recently been founded. (It is worth remembering, as context for evaluating her later achievements, that Oxford did not award degrees to women until the 1920s, while her own university did not do so until just after World War II. Until then, women received “certificates” in a given subject.) After completing her studies in Greek and Latin, she worked in the Department of Antiquities at the British Museum. This was not long after the discovery of the ruins of Troy, by the German businessman and amateur philhellene Heinrich Schliemann, had inspired new interest in archaeology as a serious scholarly enterprise; Harrison herself became close to a number of the leading scholars in the field, many of them German, with whom she traveled to important sites, and whose work would profoundly influence her appreciation of the importance of considering archaeological evidence in the study of religion. (German, it is perhaps worth adding, was one among several languages Harrison mastered; her lifelong fascination for all aspects of language is evident throughout Reminiscences. A meeting the Crown Prince of Japan left her reflecting that “Japanese is one of the few languages which contains the hard i.” Toward the end of her life, she abandoned her lifelong focus on Classics to become a scholar of Russian.)
During the 1880s and 1890s, when she was in her thirties and forties, Harrison lived in London, whose intellectual elite was then in the thrall of the Aesthetes and the Decadents. It was also a period of intense public interest in ancient Greek culture at all levels. Harrison herself participated in elaborate theatricals given by fashionable hostesses, in which the richly attired cast members would declaim Homer in Greek; these performances were eagerly reported on in fashionable magazines and critiqued by the intellectual set. They had substantive side-effects, too: it was Harrison who urged the groundbreaking choreographer Isadora Duncan to find inspiration in the Ancient Greeks.
But Harrison’s naturally dramatic nature ultimately best served her own career. The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw the explosion of her fame as a popularizer of Classics and lecturer on Greek art and archaeology. Her use of the slides and sound effects, along with her rather histrionic delivery and dazzling outfits, made these lectures into sensational events: sixteen hundred people showed up in Glasgow to hear her speak about Athenian gravestones. She herself recognized that her outsized personality and canny showmanship had as much to do with her success with audiences as did the subject itself. In Reminiscences she recalls how, after she gave a talk to the boys at Winchester College, the eminent British prep school, one of the students was asked if he liked the lecture. “Not the lecture,” the boy piped back, “but I liked the lady; she was like a beautiful green beetle.”
These and so many other amusing anecdotes, which make for such effervescent reading in Reminiscences, should not, however, detract from an appreciation of Harrison’s intellectual contributions, which remain foundational to the way in which classicists understand Greek religion and society, however much certain of her assumptions and conclusions have since been questioned. Her two magnum opuses remain in print over a century after their publication.
Partly because of that rangy intelligence, which naturally worked against the grain, partly because of her early exposure to Greek material culture—the art and artifacts she studied and worked with at the British Museum—Harrison was among the first scholars to question a number of assumptions about Ancient Greek religion. At the time, most of these had been based on what the Greeks themselves wrote about their beliefs and practices. Harrison, by contrast, turned to archaeological evidence—to depictions of religious rites and sacred objects on vases, for example—as vital primary sources; she also argued for the importance of considering pre-Classical evidence in evaluations of religious practice. Above all, she insisted on the preeminence of archaic ritual practice (“that which is done”) over literary accounts (“that which is said”) as bases for understanding the Greeks’ myth, art, society, and institutions. Whereas others had assumed that rituals were enactments of mythic narratives, for instance, Harrison argued that myths were after-the-fact attempts to explicate certain ritual practices whose origins had become obscure.
In a strikingly personal passage in Reminiscences, Harrison ruminated on the profound attraction that ritual had for her:
When I say “religion” I am instantly obliged to correct myself; it is not religion, it is ritual that absorbs me. I have elsewhere tried to show that Art is not the handmaid of Religion, but that Art in some sense springs out of Religion, and that between them is a connecting link, a bridge, and that bridge is Ritual. On that bridge, emotionally, I halt. It satisfied something within me that is appeased by neither Religion nor Art. A ritual dance, a ritual procession with vestments and lights and banners, move me as no sermon, no hymn, no pictures, no poem has ever moved me; perhaps it is because a procession seems to me like life . . .
It is hardly surprising that this remarkably vivacious personality should have been drawn to a cultural practice that, to her, exemplified the energies of “life.”
Influenced by her own temperamental attraction to ritual and drawing on recent insights by cultural anthropologists, Harrison inspired her followers, who came to be known as the “Cambridge Ritualists,” to see ritual as the living seed from which myth and a number of later cultural practices had sprung. Greek tragedy, for instance, was supposed to have sprung from a murderous rite in which the “year spirit” had to be slain. In certain circles, Harrison’s interest in the violent origins of certain rites earned her the nickname “Bloody Jane.”
Whatever the weaknesses of some of her arguments, Harrison’s approach, with its emphasis on the primitive origins of Greek institutions, profoundly disturbed the intellectual status quo, suggesting as it did the dark, irrational side of the culture that we still like to see as a model for our own. The response by the eminent German scholar Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff to Harrison’s book Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Society—in which the author traces the origins of the Greek concept of “established right,” personified by the goddess Themis, to its dim beginnings as the product of a matriarchal religion—reveals not only an anxiety about a potential threat to the high classical ideal of Greek civilization, but the unmistakable whiff of an underlying disdain for women:
The whole modern tendency seems to me to try to explain the adult man from the life of the embryo. It does not interest me much how Hecuba’s grandmother felt; not Plato’s for that matter. She was only an old woman and her faith a hag’s.
Reading Wilamowitz’s words, you get a sense of what Harrison was up against not only intellectually but professionally. Despite a handful of honorary doctorates and many important publications on art, archaeology, and religion, her candidacy for the Yates Professorship of Classics at the University of London was rejected not once but twice, to the dismay of many distinguished colleagues. She eventually took a lectureship at Newnham, from which she retired in 1922.
Harrison never married; the death of a fiancée just before their marriage was just one of the upheavals that marked her romantic life, which was replete with unrequited crushes, mostly on far younger men but, according to some biographers, including women as well. Very little of this, of course, is related in any depth in her Reminiscences, which charmingly if disingenuously skates over the rough spots even while making a tart feminist point:
By what miracle I escaped marriage I do not know, for all my life long I fell in love. But, on the whole, I am glad . . . Marriage, for a woman at least, hampers the two things that made life to me glorious—friendship and learning.
But for the most part, Reminiscences of a Student’s Life focuses on the dazzling highlights of a life lived with intensity and brilliance: the chit-chat with crowned heads, the amusing, ever-so-slightly self-deprecating anecdotes that nonetheless sneakily illuminate either her independence of mind or her personal glamor (“beautiful green beetle”), the intellectual enthusiasms, evoked with such memorable and even touching energy and candor.
In an autumnal passage toward the end of Reminiscences, Harrison dwells on the quiet satisfactions of old age: “All life has become a thing less strenuous, softer and warmer. You are allowed all sorts of comfortable little physical licenses; you may doze through dull lectures . . .” The picture is charming, but not wholly persuasive; not for the first time in these pages, you feel as though the author is playing ever so slightly to the gallery. (Nobody ever slept through her lectures, certainly.) And indeed, even as a twilit resignation starts to color the prose, the septuagenarian narrator suddenly sits bolt upright, as it were, and shakes her head. Her book is ending, and she realizes that she has no room to talk about her new projects! Travel! Russia and “the new focus of another civilization!”! Trips to France and America, and “wonderful new friends”! Can anyone wonder that this extraordinary woman, so far ahead of her time as a scholar, personality, thinker, and role model, proved to be such a restless ghost?
Daniel Mendelsohn
Barrytown, NY, October 2023