Ladies' Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy

By Yopie Prins

In Ladies' Greek, Yopie Prins illuminates a culture of female classical literacy that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, during the formation of women's colleges on both sides of the Atlantic. Why did Victorian women of letters desire to learn ancient Greek, a "dead" language written in a strange alphabet and no longer spoken? In the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, they wrote "some Greek upon the margin—lady's Greek, without the accents." Yet in the margins of classical scholarship they discovered other ways of knowing, and not knowing, Greek. Mediating between professional philology and the popularization of classics, these passionate amateurs became an important medium for classical transmission.

Combining archival research on the entry of women into Greek studies in Victorian England and America with a literary interest in their translations of Greek tragedy, Prins demonstrates how women turned to this genre to perform a passion for ancient Greek, full of eros and pathos. She focuses on five tragedies—Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound, Electra, Hippolytus, and The Bacchae—to analyze a wide range of translational practices by women and to explore the ongoing legacy of Ladies' Greek. Key figures in this story include Barrett Browning and Virginia Woolf, Janet Case and Jane Harrison, Edith Hamilton and Eva Palmer, and A. Mary F. Robinson and H.D. The book also features numerous illustrations, including photographs of early performances of Greek tragedy at women's colleges.

The first comparative study of Anglo-American Hellenism, Ladies' Greek opens up new perspectives in transatlantic Victorian studies and the study of classical reception, translation, and gender.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: May 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781400885749

Book preview

Ladies’ Greek

LADIES’

GREEK

VICTORIAN

TRANSLATIONS

OF TRAGEDY

Yopie Prins

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2017 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press,

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

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press.princeton.edu

Jacket art: Top: Andrea Eis, My pain (Sophocles, Antigone), 2012.

Bottom: marginalia by Meta Glass (detail) in Sophocles, Antigone (New York:

American Book Co., 1891), photograph courtesy of Andrea Eis, 2008.

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-0-691-14188-6

ISBN (pbk.) 978-0-691-14189-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959621

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Minion Pro

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

1   3   5   7   9   10   8   6   4   2

Dedicated to my

διδάσκαλοι

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations      ix

PREFACE      xi

Between Alpha and Omega      xi

Acknowledgments      xv

INTRODUCTION:

WOMEN AND THE GREEK ALPHABET      1

An Ode in Greek      1

Some Greek upon the Margin      5

Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?      12

Translating Greek Tragedy      26

CHAPTER ONE:

THE SPELL OF GREEK      35

Virginia Woolf’s Agamemnon Notebook      35

Cassandra between the Stage and the Page      45

OTOTOTOI      52

CHAPTER TWO:

ΙΩ IN PROMETHEUS BOUND      57

So Harsh a Chain of Suffering      57

Greek Verbs in Me      62

A Goodly Company of Lady-Translators      83

The Flight of Io, to America and Back to Greece      95

CHAPTER THREE:

THE EDUCATION OF ELECTRA      116

Behold and See      116

Electra at Girton College      124

Electra at Smith College      137

CHAPTER FOUR:

HIPPOLYTUS IN LADIES’ GREEK

(WITH THE ACCENTS)      152

New Measures for New Women      152

A Brisk Interchange of Letters      155

Euripidean (De)Cadence      163

H.D.’s Euripides: Feet, Feet, Feet, Feet      180

CHAPTER FIVE:

DANCING GREEK LETTERS      202

Modern Maenads      202

Jane Harrison’s Thrill      209

Bryn Mawr College Rituals      218

POSTFACE      233

Reading the Surface      233

Refractions of Antigone      236

How to Read Ladies’ Greek      242

Notes      247

Bibliography      265

Index      289

ILLUSTRATIONS

0.1Elizabeth Barrett Browning, First Greek Ode (1819).      xx

0.2Sara Coleridge, Translations from the Classics (1848).      9

0.3Honour to Agneta Frances Ramsay! (Cambridge, June 1887).      15

0.4A Woman’s View of the Greek Question (1891).      17

0.5Amy Levy, Sketch (ca. 1880).      21

0.6Helen Magill, The Greek Drama (1877).      30

1.1Virginia Woolf, Agamemnon Notebook (ca. 1922).      36

1.2Two Cambridge Cassandras from 1900 and 1921.      48

2.1Io in Prometheus Bound (1873).      91

2.2Annie Fields, Greek alphabet (1865).      98

2.3Annie Fields, The Flight of Io (1880).      100

2.4Advertisement for Prometheus Bound at Delphi (1927).      113

2.5Eva Palmer Sikelianos with mask of Io (1927).      115

3.1Frederic Leighton, Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon (1869).      118

3.2Janet Case as Electra, The Woman’s World (1888).      123

3.3Chorus for Electra at Girton College, Greek Plays at the Universities, The Woman’s World (1888).      125

3.4Electra with Orestes and cast in Electra at Girton College (1883).      133

3.5Electra with Chrysothemis in Electra at Girton College (1883).      135

3.6Electra with Paidagogus in Electra at Girton College (1883).      136

3.7Scene from Electra at Smith College (1889).      141

3.8Musical score for Electra at Smith College (1889).      142

3.9Chorus for Electra at Smith College (1889).      145

3.10Pose of Electra with Orestes from Electra at Smith College (1889), juxtaposed with classical sculpture.      146

3.11Playbill for Electra at Smith College (1889).      147

3.12Electra Album, Smith College (ca. 1890).      149

4.1A. Mary F. Robinson at the British Museum (1885).      154

4.2A. Mary F. Robinson, letter to John Addington Symonds (1879).      174

5.1Dance of Maenads in Margaret Verrall and Jane Harrison, Mythology & Monuments of Ancient Athens (1890).      210

5.2Maenad in Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903).      215

5.3Playbill for The Bacchae at Bryn Mawr College (1935).      224

5.4Chorus for The Bacchae at Bryn Mawr College (1935).      225

5.5Eva Palmer Sikelianos, notes for The Bacchae (1934–1935).      226

5.6Instructions for dancing in The Bacchae (1934–1935).      228

5.7Chorus in The Bacchae at Smith College (1934).      230

5.8Chorus in The Bacchae at Smith College (1934).      230

5.9Chorus in The Bacchae at Smith College (1934).      231

5.10Chorus Leader in The Bacchae at Smith College (1934).      231

6.1Delicacy of the passive, marginalia (detail) by Meta Glass in Sophocles, Antigone (ca. 1909).      234

6.2Artwork by Andrea Eis, "Where do the depths come in? (Sophocles, Antigone)" (2008).      235

6.3St. Valentine’s Day at Girton (1876).      238

6.4Antigone at Spelman College (1933).      241

6.5My pain, marginalia (detail) by Meta Glass in Sophocles, Antigone (ca. 1909).      244

6.6Artwork by Andrea Eis, "My pain (Sophocles, Antigone)" (2012).      245

PREFACE

BETWEEN ALPHA AND OMEGA

"The dear delight of learning for learning’s sake a ‘dead’ language for sheer love of the beauty of its words and the delicacy of its syntactical relations . . . was . . . in a few laggard minds still obscurely is, unwomanly. Why?" Jane Ellen Harrison posed this rhetorical question in Alpha and Omega, published in 1915, toward the end of her years as a classical scholar at Cambridge University. In Ladies’ Greek, I turn the question around in order to ask how the delight of learning a dead language became a mark of womanly character. How might we read Harrison’s Why? back into the nineteenth century, to learn more about the ways in which women learned to read the Greek alphabet, to discover all the letters between alpha and omega? Why did women in Victorian England and America desire to learn ancient Greek, and how did they turn it into a language of and for desire? What was the appeal of a dead language, written in a strange alphabet and no longer spoken?

Women’s desire for Greek was part of a larger culture that believed in building literary character through linguistic discipline, and especially through learning classical languages. In the course of the nineteenth century, during the transition from informal to formal education for women, and the formation of women’s colleges on both sides of the Atlantic, women were drawn to the cultural prestige of Greek studies as one way to justify their claim to higher education. They also cultivated ancient Greek to distinguish a new class of women writers: from the broad literary culture associated with nineteenth-century Women of Letters emerged the Woman of Greek Letters, a generic figure mediating between classical literature and its popular reception, between the professionalization of philology and the popularization of classics, between classical literacy and the common reader. Through their mediation of Greek letters, these Anglo-American women became an important medium for classical transmission in the nineteenth century, and well into the next century.

My book combines an historical interest in the entry of Victorian women into Greek studies with a literary interest in their translations of Greek tragedy. Of course, they were reading and translating other classical texts as well; the active role played by women in the wide circulation of classics (including Ladies’ Latin alongside Ladies’ Greek) is a topic that deserves further elaboration in books beyond my own. Women’s contribution to nineteenth-century classical discourses has been a focus of ongoing research by scholars such as Mary Beard, Rowena Fowler, Edith Hall, Lorna Hardwick, Fiona Macintosh, and Jennifer Wallace, and has sparked interest among a new generation of critics, such as Isobel Hurst in Victorian Women Writers and the Classics (2006), Shanyn Fiske in Heretical Hellenism (2008), Stefano Evangelista in British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (2009), Tracy Olverson in Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism (2010), Theodore Koulouris in Hellenism and Loss in the Work of Virginia Woolf (2011), in a special issue of Women’s Studies edited by Noah Comet on Nineteenth-century Women Writers and the Classical Inheritance (2011), and in various contributions to The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 4 (2015). On the other side of the Atlantic, the world of American women’s classicism has been opened up for further exploration by Caroline Winterer in The Mirror of Antiquity (2007), in essays edited by Gregory Staley for American Women and Classical Myths (2008), by Helene Foley in Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the U.S. Stage (2012), and in various contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (2015). Uncovering a multiplicity of materials in order to recover the history of women in classics, this research has called into question a common assumption among classical scholars and cultural historians—including an earlier generation of feminist literary critics—that women were excluded from a masculine tradition of classical learning in the nineteenth century. Beyond a broad survey of multiple women or a more narrow focus on individual women within this history, we can now begin to read in further detail exactly how these women engaged with ideas about classical antiquity, and how much they contributed to the idealization of all things Greek.

When I started delving into the archives of women’s colleges and literary papers stowed away in libraries and other special collections, my purpose was to find the traces of women writers who learned to read and translate ancient Greek in nineteenth-century England and America. In this respect, and in retrospect, my book is a recovery project with a longer genealogy in feminist literary history. Back in 1984, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published an essay in The Female Autograph, entitled Ceremonies of the Alphabet, that began (as I just did) with a quotation from Harrison. They noted that female artists have long meditated on what Jane Ellen Harrison calls the elements of writing—meditated, that is, on the implications of the alphabet itself, much as Harrison does in ‘Alpha and Omega.’ (40) In their own meditation, Gilbert and Gubar asked of the woman writer: How can she employ the alphabet to perpetuate the most elementary traces of her identity—a meaningful auto-graph? (26) At a time when feminist critics were especially interested in claiming the identity of the woman writer and identifying a tradition of women’s writing, that seemed like the right question to ask.

But rather than reclaiming the identities of women who are featured in this book, I am more interested in their strange identification with Greek letters, the desire to identify with a dead language not one’s own. Mediated by ancient Greek, the translator’s autograph is the trace of reading and writing something other than the autobiographical identity of the woman writer. It is not my intention to discover the authorial voices of these women. Instead I ask, how did they read and translate Greek texts, and how do we read the texts that they read and translated? Their translations confront us with a series of questions, not only about what is being read, but also what resists reading, what can no longer be read, what can never be read. In this encounter with the literality of Greek letters, we see something untranslatable, suspended between knowing and not knowing Greek.

By looking closely at women’s textual engagements with Greek tragedy, I offer more detailed literary analysis of materials that are part of the larger cultural history of Victorian Hellenism and the longer history of translating and performing classical drama. I argue that nineteenth-century women writers turned to tragedy in particular as a literary genre for the performance of female classical literacy, dramatizing the encounter with Greek letters as a scene highly charged with eros and pathos. This passionate reading of Greek led them into various forms of translation, turning their favorite Greek tragedies into a creative opportunity for literary transformation, without claiming the authority of classical scholarship. They were amateurs, not philologists: rather than mastering Greek texts as an object of knowledge, they translated tragedy in private and in public in order to perform other ways of knowing and doing Greek.

Emphasizing a range of women’s translational practices, I consider transcriptions, transliterations, transformations, and transpositions of five Greek tragedies in particular: the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, transcribed by Virginia Woolf in one of her reading notebooks (Chapter One); the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, translated by a series of lady-translators in England and America (Chapter Two); the Electra of Sophocles, performed in ancient Greek by the ladies of Girton College and Smith College (Chapter Three); the Hippolytus of Euripides, transformed into new lyric meters (Chapter Four); the Bacchae of Euripides, transposed into dancing letters by women posing as modern maenads (Chapter Five). In each chapter I explore translation as a multilayered literary and multifaceted cultural production. Much more than a straightforward movement from one language to another, translating Greek tragedy allowed women to move between languages, in a continual mediation between Greek and English, between different modes of reading and writing, and between different media.

The traces of these translations are visible in the rich and varied archive of Ladies’ Greek, and my book offers glimpses of materials I have found: manuscripts and marginalia, sketches and photographs, personal diaries and reading journals, old periodicals and books no longer in print. Here we see how women performed female classical literacy, by writing through and around and between the letters of the Greek alphabet. The Introduction opens up this archive as a scene for reading Greek letters, and in my conclusion (Postface) I reflect further on archival reading as another performance of translation. What prompted my years of archival research was a growing recognition that my own passionate reading of Greek letters is more than personal; it has a longer history that can be understood according to the conventions of Ladies’ Greek that I identify (with) in this book.

Here is one version of that story, both my own and not my own. In The Netherlands my grandfather memorized long passages of Homer in his spare time, and when he saw how much I liked his Greek recitations, he passed along to me his classical texts with marginal notes and sketches that he made as a schoolboy. From my grandmother I heard about a great-aunt named Tante Paula, who knew Latin and some Greek (in the margins) but was too shy to pursue a teaching career in the classroom. My parents learned Greek as part of their Dutch gymnasium education, where my mother pursued alpha studies in humanities and my father beta in sciences. I too learned to love the Greek alphabet at Swarthmore College, from professors I loved: Gil Rose, Martin Ostwald, Lucy McDiarmid, Georgia Nugent, Helen North. The Greek texts I read as an undergraduate made a deep impression on me, especially the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in my Honors Seminar.

After graduating I followed in the footsteps of Helen Magill, although her name was unfamiliar to me at the time: a century earlier, she had studied Greek and Latin at Swarthmore College, and then travelled to England to pursue further studies among the first generation of women at Newnham College, Cambridge. I spent two years at Newnham College, walking through those long corridors, past the portrait of a languid Jane Ellen Harrison, and into the lecture halls of Cambridge University, where I heard Raymond Williams lecturing about the ideological and institutional history of the Tragedy Paper that is still required for the English Tripos Examinations. I read a lot of Sophocles, as Professor Pat Easterling cheerfully supervised my melancholy reading of Electra, and encouraged me to audition for Sophocles’ Women of Trachis in a centenary production of the Cambridge Greek Play in 1983. As a member of the tragic chorus, a giggly group of Cambridge girls, I learned to incorporate metrical recitation of ancient Greek into a choreography of awkward gestures and poses.

Like so many Women of Greek Letters before me, I turned to tragedy in particular as a genre to perform (and prove, to some degree) my classical literacy. When I returned to America to earn my doctoral degree in Comparative Literature, I continued my intensive reading of Greek tragedy: with Froma Zeitlin who so brilliantly illuminated the Oresteia, line by line; with Robert Fagles who demonstrated the poetics of translating tragedy, word by word; with Glenn Most who delighted in scanning choral meters, syllable by syllable; and with Anne Carson who looked ever more closely at the Greek alphabet, letter by letter, to see its strangeness. Learning ancient Greek was my rite of passage into an academic career, which began with a doctoral dissertation on Victorian translations of Greek tragedy. And in my subsequent research on women translating Greek tragedy, I have found myself rereading and retranslating some of the same texts that contributed to the formation of my own literary character. More generic than personal, this intellectual autobiography is also a history of the institutions that made me, if not quite a philologist, a scholar involved in reading and teaching classical texts, and interested in learning more about the history of women in classical education.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to acknowledge the generous institutional and personal support I have received over the years for Ladies’ Greek. Initial research was funded by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. At the University of Michigan, I received several Spring/Summer Research Grants from the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, and the final stages of writing were supported with timely sabbaticals combined with scholarly leave from the College of Literature, Science and the Arts. I am deeply grateful for a Collegiate Professorship that has provided ongoing research support as well as funding for illustrations, permissions, and preparation of the manuscript.

Special gratitude goes to the helpful and resourceful archivists I met during my travels to special collections and college archives, including the Berg Collection (New York Public Library), the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (University of Texas at Austin), the Manuscript Collections at Cornell University, the Cambridge Greek Play Archive (Cambridge University Library), the Armstrong Browning Library (Baylor University), the Bedford Centre for the History of Women (Royal Holloway), the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Huntington Library, the Schlesinger Library (Harvard University), the Benaki Museum Archives (Athens), Special Collections at the University of Michigan, the National Library of France (Paris), the Beinecke Library (Yale University), the Sophia Smith Collection (Smith College), the Girton College Archive, the Newnham College Archive, the Bryn Mawr College Archive, and the Spelman College Archive.

Chapter 1 was previously published as OTOTOTOI: Virginia Woolf and the naked cry of Cassandra in Agamemnon in Performance, ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, Pantelis Michelakis, Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005): 163–185, and is reprinted here (with minor revisions) by permission of Oxford University Press. An early version of Chapter 2 appeared as "The Sexual Politics of Translating Prometheus Bound" in Cultural Critique 74 (Winter 2010): 164–180, and is included here (in expanded form) by permission of the University of Minnesota Press. Chapter 4 includes an article published as Lady’s Greek (with the accents): A metrical translation of Euripides by A. Mary F. Robinson in Victorian Literature and Culture 34.2 (2006): 591–618, and is reprinted here (with minor revisions) by permission of Cambridge University Press. Excerpts from Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters, first published in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 43–81, are incorporated into Chapter 5 and my conclusion, by permission from University of Chicago Press.

My research for Ladies’ Greek has developed through numerous conference papers and panels, beginning with the first international conference on Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1993 (Armstrong Browning Library) and the conference on American Women and Classical Myth in 1999 (University of Maryland), and continuing in sessions at the American Comparative Literature Association, the Modern Language Association, the North American Victorian Studies Association, and the American Philological Association. I was honored to give guest lectures and keynote presentations as well, at Swarthmore College, Haverford College, UC Berkeley, Birkbeck College, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Columbia University, Kansas State University, Villanova University, University of Georgia, Princeton University, Grand Valley State University, Oxford University, Yale University, Miami University of Ohio (Altman Lecture), the Institute of English Studies (London), Smith College, Northwestern University, Drew University (Shilpa Raval Memorial Lecture), University of Tel Aviv (Martin Ostwald Memorial Lecture), University of Maryland, the Classics Triennial (Cambridge University), and the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities. On each of these occasions, I found keen interlocutors and audiences who responded generously to my research and helped me refine my arguments.

I have been buoyed over the years by the intellectual engagement and personal encouragement of my beloved colleagues at the University of Michigan, including members of the Department Comparative Literature, the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Classical Studies, the Nineteenth Century Forum, and Contexts for Classics. Rather than naming you individually I thank you, collectively, for ongoing dialogue and collaboration. I am deeply appreciative of the hard work by faculty committees that reviewed my research for promotion, grants, and awards over the years. I appreciate the outstanding work of my graduate student research assistants over the years on this project: Jean Borger, Jessica Roberts, Charles LaPorte, Meilee Bridges, Sheshalatha Reddy, Adam Mazel, Julia Hansen, Mason Jabbari. The dedication of this book to my teachers includes all of my students at the University of Michigan as well, as I have learned much from you over the years.

There are colleagues at other institutions I also wish to acknowledge, so many that I can only list alphabetically (with profound gratitude, and equally profound apologies for omissions): Ann Cooper Albright, Isobel Armstrong, Mary Beard, Linda Hunt Beckman, Lee Behlman, Susan Bernstein, Alison Booth, Florence Boos, Kate Bosher, Joseph Bristow, Julia Carlson, Max Cavitch, Michael Cohen, Joy Connolly, Mary Jean Corbett, Emily Dalgano, Richard Dellamora, Cynthia Dessin, Stefano Evangelista, Alice Falk, Shanyn Fiske, Helene Foley, Clare L. E. Foster, Rowena Fowler, Simon Goldhill, Stathis Gourgouris, Susan Gubar, Constanze Guthenke, Edith Hall, Judith Hallett, Betsy Harries, Emily Harrington, Judith Hawley, Renee Hoogland, Linda Hughes, Isobel Hurst, Philip Horne, Leslie Kurke, Jill Lamberton, Miriam Leonard, Margaret Linley, Mary Loeffelholz, Tricia Lootens, Michael Lucey, Deborah Lyons, Fiona Macintosh, Meredith Martin, Richard Martin, Catherine Maxwell, Laura McClure, Denise McCoskey, Meredith McGill, Pantelis Michelakis, Bridget Murnaghan, Cornelia Pearsall, Linda Peterson, James I. Porter, Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Suzanne Raitt, Diane Rayor, Eliza Richards, Adam Roberts, Deborah Roberts, Jason Rudy, Jonah Siegel, Eleni Sikelianos, Alexandra Socarides, Vivasvan Soni, Christopher Stray, Beverly Taylor, Oliver Taplin, Marion Thain, Nancy Worman, Ana Vadillo, Karen Van Dyck, Gonda Van Steen, Jennifer Wallace, Carolyn Williams, Caroline Winterer.

I am grateful to the external readers who reviewed the manuscript for publication, and to the editors at Princeton University Press, especially Anne Savarese, for keeping faith in this project. Thanks to Kathleen Cioffi, Jay Boggis, and David Luljak for their patience and diligence in preparing, editing, and indexing the book for publication. It seems more than coincidence that assistance with Greek fonts came from Beau Case, a distant relative of Janet Case. And my special thanks to Andrea Eis for sharing with me her work on Meta Glass for Marginalia, and giving permission for images that appear in the Postface of this book.

My nearest and dearest have witnessed with love and endured with patience my long labor on Ladies’ Greek. I am blessed with friends who have known me since the early years of my Greek studies, especially Ira Gitlin, Gelina Harlaftis, Tanina Rostain, Rachel Rue, Photini Sinnis, and Wynette Yao. I am grateful to Karin Ahbel-Rappe and Rena Seltzer for their encouragement, and I would not have been able to finish this book without the generous friendship and support of my writing group: Kathryn Babayan, Artemis Leontis, Peggy McCracken, Elizabeth Wingrove. I have been sustained and inspired by the brilliance of Anne Carson and Adela Pinch and the late Patricia Yaeger; also Martin Harries and, as always, Virginia Jackson. I am honored to hold a Collegiate Professorship named after Irene Butter, who sets a radiant example in combining research and teaching and academic service with a broader sense of family, community, and humanitarian goals. I thank my extended family, including my mother Jonny Prins and Dietz Kessler, my brother and sisters with their partners and children, my relatives in the Netherlands, all five Al-Maawi children, and Evelyn Prins Daugherty. Michael Daugherty has created a musical space, literally and figuratively, where we can each work and share life together, alpha to omega.

Ladies’ Greek

0.1 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, First Greek Ode May 4th, 1819 To Summer. Holograph poem in Greek. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

INTRODUCTION

Women and the Greek Alphabet

AN ODE IN GREEK

At the age of thirteen, a precocious English girl composed a poem in ancient Greek. Entitled First Greek Ode May 4th, 1819 To Summer, the manuscript is difficult to decipher (Figure 0.1).¹ Written in awkward letters and riddled with errors, the Greek words appear mostly without accents or other diacritical marks. Here is a transcription, a transliteration, and my version of a literal translation:

Μουσα καταβε(αινε) αδειν

Εξ αναντιας του πολου

Μουσα δεομαι σοῦ τοῦτο

Κελευε την λυρην αντηχειν

Ω Μουσα επιπνε με.

Ασπαζω σε ω θερε

Ἡ Μουσα ασπαζει σε

Ἡ φυσις ασπαζει σε

Ὁ κοκκυξ ασπαζει σε

Και οἱ αοιδοι των νεμων!

Ασπαζω σε ω θερε.

Mousa katabe(aine) adein

Eks anantias tou polou

Mousa deomai sou touto

Keleue ten luren antechein

O Mousa epipne me.

Aspasdo se o there

He Mousa aspasdei se

He phusis aspasdei se

Ho kokkuks aspasdei se

Kai hoi aoidoi ton nemon!

Aspasdo se o there.

Muse descend to sing

Down from the sky

Muse I beg this of you

Command the lyre to resound

O Muse inspire me.

I welcome you O summer

The Muse welcomes you

Nature welcomes you

The cuckoo welcomes you

And the singers of the meadow!

I welcome you O summer.

The ode begins with an invocation in line 1, where the letter omikron is combined with upsilon in Μουσα, spelling out the name of the Muse. Although the verb katabe(aine) in line 1 has several letters crossed out (by mistake) it seems to be an imperative: Muse descend to sing (Μουσα καταβαινε αδειν). Line 2 imagines the Muse appearing down from the sky (Εξ αναντιας τοu πολου),² and in line 3 the Muse is reinvoked with a verb in the first person: Muse, I beg this of you (Μουσα δεομαι σοῦ τοῦτο). Perhaps this refers back to the previous lines, begging the Muse to make herself visible. Or perhaps this refers forward, begging the Muse to make herself audible, as we read in line 4: Command the lyre to sound (Κελευε την λυρην αντηχειν). Line 5 repeats the call to the Muse, this time with a vocative that superimposes omega over the capital O: O Muse, inspire me (Ω Μουσα επιπνε με).

From omikron to omega, little o to big O, the ode asks for inspiration to breathe new life into an ancient language, much as summer breathes life into nature and makes it sing. As a prelude, line 6 modulates from invocation to apostrophe: I welcome you, O Summer (Ασπαζω σε ω θερε). Starting in line 7, breathing marks begin to appear for the first time, before the letter eta in Ἡ Μουσα, as if the muse herself is sighing a warm breath in response to summer’s breeze: The muse welcomes you (Ἡ Μουσα ασπαζει σε). The verb aspazei recalls the salutation in the epistles of St. Paul, a revelation of the spirit in the letter that is projected here into the natural world, as the verb is repeated in line 8, Nature welcomes you (Ἡ φυσιs ασπαζει σε), and again in line 9, The cuckoo welcomes you (Ἡ κοκκυξ ασπαζει σε). In line 10 the sound of the cuckoo is amplified into the song of many birds: And the singers of the meadow! (Και οἱ αοιδοι των νεμων!). The last line of the ode joins the choir of birdsong by repeating line 6, like a musical refrain: I welcome you, O Summer (Ασπαζω σε ω θερε).

First Greek Ode thus performs a rhetorical turn around its own invocation. Beginning and ending in the vocative (Μουσα is the first word, ω θερε the last), it invokes the first songs of summer in order to assert the vocation of the young poet, her own first song. At the bottom of the page, the ode is signed E B Barrett (Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, later known as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or E.B.B). Although its meter is irregular, the ode creates a musical figure for the song of the poet, who tries to warble her own rhythmic cadences as the Greek muse teaches her to sing (adein) along with the poetic birds: in the ode those singers of the meadow are called aoidoi, the Greek word for poets. But has ancient Greek been translated into the sounds and rhythms of the world, or does the ode translate the sounds and rhythms of the world into ancient Greek? And can these sounds be heard at all? The lyre that seems to resound in line 4 (αντηχειν, anti + echo) is but an echo of a dead language that is no longer heard or spoken. Letter by letter, word by word, line by line, it is spelled out in a strange alphabet.

I came across this lovely ode in girlish Greek when I was leafing through the papers of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the New York Public Library. Copied out by hand on a loose page, this manuscript was carefully preserved as a piece of juvenilia and inserted into her mother’s commonplace book. Although reproduced as a facsimile in a pamphlet from 1971 (New in the Berg Collection), and duly noted in 1984 as an entry in The Browning Collections: A Reconstruction with Other Memorabilia, the ode was not translated or collected in any book until its publication in The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 2010, compiled by a team of E.B.B. scholars.³ Their long collective labor of editing the complete poems—the first scholarly edition since 1900, with annotations on manuscript revisions and variant editions—is a feminist project of recovery, discovering new materials and making it possible to read E.B.B. in new ways. But the appearance of this ode in print should not efface the traces of E.B.B.’s handwriting, especially if we want to read her emergence as a Woman of Letters by retracing the outlines of the letters that she wrote in Greek.

E.B.B. was spell-bound by ancient Greek for many years. In Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character, an autobiographical essay she started writing just a few months after her First Greek Ode, she defined her literary character through an intense identification with Greek letters. Having learned to read and write Greek at an early age, first on her own and then with her brother’s tutor, she confessed: To comprehend even the Greek alphabet was delight inexpressible. Under the tuition of Mr. McSwiney I attained that which I so fervently desired (350). Ancient Greek became her language of and for desire, as she proclaimed with girlish delight in an escalating series of exclamation points: To be a good linguist is the height of my ambition & I do not believe that I can ever cease desiring to attain this!! . . . I well remember three years ago ere I had the advantage of Mr. McSwiney’s instruction & crying very heartily for half an hour because I did not understand Greek!!! (355) E.B.B. went on to cultivate her understanding of Greek with a series of mentors; after grammatical instruction with Mr. McSwiney, she exchanged erudite letters on Greek metrics and the pronunciation of classical languages with Sir Uvedale Price, and in her twenties she read Greek literature together with the blind scholar Hugh Stuart Boyd, who liked to call her Porsonia (after the English classical scholar, Richard Porson). Having dedicated much of her youth to Greek studies, she wrote to Boyd in 1827: "I intend to give up Greek when I give up poetry; &,—as Porson said on a case equally decided,—"not till then. Tho’ I never become a critical scholar, I may continue to enjoy that divine poetical literature, for whose sake I encountered the language (BC 2:56).

This passion for Greek is put on display in the manuscript of First Greek Ode, where E.B.B. has transformed her early reading of Greek into the poetic performance of her own writing. As Poet Laureat of Hope End by the age of eight, E.B.B. had started composing English verses for her family at Hope End Mansion. Between 1815 to 1816 she penned a series of little odes, invoking the muse for her brother’s birthday (Oh Come Fair Muse, Oh raise thy fondest strain / Come let us hear thy plaintive voice again), her mother’s birthday (Come Oh my Muse, Sing of the first of May / . . . And cheer my verses with a bounteous smile / Aurora sings in her triumphal car / And Nature’s Music does the hour beguile), and her father’s birthday (Hail dear Papa! I hail thy natal day / The Muses speak my hidden thoughts of love / . . . Sweet Philomel enchants the listening grove / While music’s warblings twitter in her throat). In 1817 she wrote The Sorrows of the Muses as her first long poem (dedicated to her mother), and by 1818 she was writing The Battle of Marathon (dedicated to her father and printed for private publication in 1820). Thus, by the time she composed her First Greek Ode in 1819, E.B.B. was trying to transpose these classical themes and tropes back into the language from which they were derived: the invocation to the muse, the echoing of her song in nature’s music, the warbling of birds in groves and meadows, as if the whole world could be translated into and out of ancient Greek.

Two decades later, in yet another Biographical Sketch, E.B.B. described the poetic ambitions of her girlhood with some amusement, as the narrative of nascent odes epics & didactics crying aloud on obsolete Muses from childish lips. The muse invoked in her First Greek Ode must have seemed the most obsolete of them all, an obscure exercise in a dead language. But reading and writing ancient Greek was a formative experience for E.B.B., who remembered her early years at Hope End as a retirement scarcely broken to me except by books & my own thoughts, when she read Greek as hard under the trees as some of your Oxonians in the Bodleian—gathered visions from Plato & the dramatists—eat & drank Greek & made my head ache with it. (BC 7.353–54) Her desire for Greek was so intense, she fixated on the Greek alphabet and revived it in her thoughts, as if she herself might re-embody this dead language and bring it back to life. As a girl she did not have access to universities such as Oxford, where she might peruse Greek texts alongside students and scholars at the Bodleian Library, but she imagined another locus for reading Greek that took a different form. Reading Greek under the trees, in the shadow of her imagination, she lifted archaic letters off the page and projected them out of books and beyond the library, into the inner life of her mind and the life of the world outside her. Not quite dead and not quite alive, ancient Greek seemed to have an afterlife of its own, strangely reanimated.

SOME GREEK UPON THE MARGIN

The afterlife of Greek letters, variously transliterated, transcribed, translated, transformed, and performed by women in Victorian England and America, is the subject of my book. E.B.B. was not the only one to identify her literary character through identification with ancient Greek. By 1840, she had acquired the reputation of an exceptionally literary woman: Miss Elizabeth Barrett may justly claim to stand alone . . . as well for her extraordinary acquaintance with ancient classic literature, as for the boldness of her poetic attempts.⁴ But the example of E.B.B. was generic; or rather, her exemplarity was generic in being figured as exceptional. As we shall see, there were many women who cultivated a passionate reading of Greek, and each seemed exceptional in her own way. In their diaries, correspondence, autobiographies, biographies, and other narratives, we encounter again and again a narrative of desire for ancient Greek that has its own predictable topoi: an early encounter with the Greek alphabet, a primal scene of falling in love with the language, a pedagogical experience that revolves around the pain and pleasure of learning to read Greek, an attempt to translate and incorporate Greek into a body of writing, an idea that the woman writer herself might be the very embodiment of Greek letters.

In the course of the nineteenth century, learning Greek increasingly served as a rite of passage to become a woman of letters. The phrase is a late Victorian invention, but as Linda Peterson has argued, women of letters flourished throughout the century, as women increasingly conceived of their literary careers and constructed their public personae in a professional mode.⁵ The public persona of E.B.B was one