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 synthesised new developments in archaeology and anthropology and helped revolutionise the study of ancient Greek civilisation. 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.
Daniel Mendelsohn's books include The Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays, and translations of the collected poems of Sappho and C. P. Cavafy.
“Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick Cambridge classicist and
celebrity public intellectual . . . cultivated a distinctive brand
of quirky and memorable outspokenness . . . Reminiscences of a
Student’s Life [is] a tremendous read . . . She remains my hero . .
. because she was so sharply aware of the stories women needed to
be told about succeeding as a woman; and she was brilliant at
telling them. She has remained the iron in my soul.” —Mary Beard,
London Review of Books
“Captivating recollections . . . This charming memoir by classicist
and educator Harrison (1850-1928), published in 1925 by Leonard and
Virginia Woolf, and now reissued with an introduction by Daniel
Mendelsohn, offers a graceful portrait of a spirited woman. At
times curmudgeonly, at times irreverent, always shrewdly
perceptive.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[Her] intellectual power seems to me not only sensible but immense
. . . and the effects of education and liberty scarcely to be
overrated.” —Virginia Woolf, The New Statesman
“Jane Ellen Harrison changed the way we think about ancient Greek
culture—peeling back that calm, white marble exterior to reveal
something much more violent, messy and ecstatic underneath (‘bloody
Jane’ they called her, for more reasons than one, I suspect). And
she was the first woman in England to become an academic, in the
fully professional sense—an ambitious, full-time, salaried,
university researcher and lecturer. She made it possible for me to
do what I do.” —Mary Beard, The Guardian
“A groundbreaking heroine of intellectual life . . . [Harrison’s]
breezy and highly entertaining memoir . . . gives a powerful sense
of what made its author at once so fascinating and so important.”
—Daniel Mendelsohn, from the Foreword
“Harrison was a vivid and controversial intellectual presence both
in this country and in England, particularly among writers (Yeats
and D. H. Lawrence are among those who acknowledged her influence)
. . . 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
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