Reminiscences of a Student's Life

By Jane Ellen Harrison and Daniel Mendelsohn

The arch, witty, outspoken memoirs of the pioneering archaeologist and scholar Mary Beard has called “my hero.”

First published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1925, Jane Ellen Harrison’s Reminiscences are the irreverent memoirs of a student who declared Victorian education “ingeniously useless,” who blazed a trail for female scholars, and who changed the way we see the ancient world. Growing up in the Yorkshire countryside, Harrison showed an early aptitude for languages: by the age of seventeen, with the help of a governess, she had learned Greek, Latin, German, and some Hebrew. (“Unfortunately, having no guide, we began with the Psalms, which are hard nuts to crack.”) She went on to become the most influential Classicist of her generation. Drawing on the insights of Nietzsche, Bergson, and Freud, and on archaeological research, she helped to revolutionize the study of Greek myth. “The great Mother,” she wrote, “is prior to male divinities.”

Unconventional in her private life (“By what miracle I escaped marriage I do not know, for all my life I fell in love”), she spent her later years with the poet and novelist Hope Mirrlees, thirty-seven years her junior. Harrison’s zest for life is everywhere in these pages. Sprightly, amused, and amusing, her Reminiscences form an unforgettable sketch of a woman ahead of her time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: McNally Editions
• Release date: Mar 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9781961341982

Jane Ellen Harrison

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.

Book preview

Reminiscences of a Student’s Life: A Memoir, by Jane Ellen Harrison. Foreword by Daniel Mendelsohn. McNally Editions No. 27Reminiscences of a Student’s Life by Jane Ellen Harrison. With a Foreword by Daniel Mendelsohn. McNally Editions. New York

FOREWORD

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,