After brief spells teaching girls at Oxford High School and Notting Hill High School, she was introduced to Sir Charles Newton, keeper of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum, who was impressed by her vivacity and invited her to guide parties of elderly ladies around the antiquities rooms. Soon, Harrison was making a living through her ‘perambulating lectures’: over the next decade she travelled the country delivering almost theatrical performances, designed to bring alive the spirit of ancient festivals, dances and sacrifices. She would dress in spangled satin gowns, strings of Egyptian beads and a glittering shawl, which she shrugged off her shoulders at moments of high drama; she would dim the lights to simulate nocturnal mystic worship, launch into peals of fluent Greek, and on one occasion placed two collaborators at the back of the auditorium to swing ‘bull-roarers’ in the manner of Orphic initiations, so the audience could experience the eerie sound emanating from an unseen place. In 1891, the Pall Mall Gazette described Harrison as ‘the lady to whose lectures during the last ten years the revival of popular interest in Greece is almost solely due’.
Jane Harrison as Alcestis, Oxford, 1887
Yet popular acclaim was not mirrored by institutional support. In an interview with the Women’s Penny Paper in 1889, asked whether being a woman had hampered her in launching her career, Harrison – who never wanted to be pitied – insisted it had not: ‘A woman was a novelty in this field, and my being one was in my favour with regard to professional popularity.’ But the previous year, Harrison had applied to succeed Newton as the Yates Chair of Classical Archaeology at University College London, and was rejected at the final stage. Despite the recommendation of a long list of referees – including a roster of international archaeologists, museum directors and academics – two of the committee signed a document stating that it was ‘undesirable that any teaching in University College should be conducted by a woman’. In 1896, she tried again for the post; this time the board refused her, with no hint of irony, on the grounds that despite her Newnham education she ‘had not enjoyed the same opportunities for a thorough scholarly grounding in the details of the various branches’. A quiet word from a committee member in favour of his former student, Ernest Gardner, confirmed Harrison’s exclusion. In her novel Jacob’s Room, Woolf describes a female student staring at the ceiling of the British Museum Reading Room while she waits for her books, noticing not a single woman among the names engraved on the dome: the library’s very architecture implies that only men have been and will ever be scholars. Aged nearly fifty, with honorary degrees from Aberdeen and Durham to her name yet no university appointment, Jane Harrison must have felt the same sinking conviction that the world was skewed against her. She knew, as Woolf did, that time, space and money were required in order to produce a significant work of scholarship; it appeared inevitable that Harrison was destined to remain a perpetual outsider, despite her efforts and obvious ability.
But just as her mother’s legacy had secured her university education against her father’s wishes, it was the help of women, and the support of a female institution, that changed Harrison’s fortunes. In 1898, she was invited to return to Newnham College as the first recipient of a new three-year fellowship created especially for the benefit of former pupils. Harrison accepted with delight, determined, now she had the chance, to create an environment in which she could dedicate her life to work. In London, Harrison’s freelance income had been precarious, her concentration disrupted by lecturing engagements all over the country, her housemates difficult and her shared rooms cramped. But now, she had a regular salary and her own private study once more; the calm of the college’s large garden provided a welcome sanctuary for ideas to form, while she was surrounded by an energetic community of women scholars, many of whom – including Pernel Strachey, Mary Paley Marshall and Eleanor Sidgwick – became lifelong friends. From the start, eager to make up for lost time, Harrison insisted that her position should involve only research, forgoing teaching duties along with the administrative and pastoral responsibilities that such roles usually entail. After negotiations, it was agreed that she would give one lecture a week in exchange for the freedom to travel, read and write. Within college, Harrison’s commitment to pure scholarship was admired: she gained the respect of her colleagues (though several resented having to perform the drudgery she had circumvented) and quickly became a favourite among the students, who would flock to her rooms after dinner to share cigarettes and whisky, lounging in her sunken armchairs and rifling through the prints of Greek vases scattered across the floor. An enthusiastic profile of Harrison in the feminist weekly Time and Tide praised her as ‘one woman who did not allow herself to be limited by what anyone expected of a University woman lecturer: who in that capacity dressed as she liked, theorised as she liked and taught as she liked’.
When she had first arrived at Newnham as a student, Harrison’s grasp of Greek grammar lagged behind that of her male counterparts who had been studying the subject since childhood, and she never felt entirely confident in philology. But on her return as a fellow, she made a virtue of that outsider status by smashing through the existing boundaries of the discipline. Within five years, Harrison had published her groundbreaking Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, a sprawling, conversational work which she referred to gleefully as ‘the fat and comely one’. It was the product of decades of research, finally come to fruition at Newnham, where the recognition of an institution at last gave her the confidence to write at length and with authority. Over the next two decades, the support of the women’s college was repaid with a series of triumphant works of scholarship which wrote women back into history, and opened up creative possibilities for historians, poets and novelists alike.
Jane Harrison had entered academia at a time when the field of classical scholarship was focused narrowly on the detailed editing of canonical texts. But over the last decades of the nineteenth century, archaeological digs sprang up across Europe and the Middle East, and a host of dramatic discoveries made the ancient world feel suddenly alive, close and human. Heinrich Schliemann, an eccentric former businessman with an eye for drama, made international headlines for his excavations at Hisarlik in Turkey, which he insisted offered historical proof for the battle described in Homer’s Iliad. ‘I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon,’ he is supposed to have declared, emerging from a tomb, while newspapers printed photographs of his glamorous wife, Sophia, bedecked in the jewels of Helen of Troy. Harrison travelled the continent with the archaeologists’ retinues, gathering fresh material for her books and lectures: to Athens, where she smoked a pipe on the steps of the Parthenon, to Corinth, where her party mounted the Acrocorinth on mules, and to Bassae, where she slept out on the hillside under the remains of Apollo’s temple. She visited Knossos, a newly discovered palace on the island of Crete, in the first year of Arthur Evans’s famous excavation there, and discovered something which captured her imagination: a seal impression of a bull-headed Minotaur, seated on a throne with a worshipper bent before him. ‘Zeus is nowhere,’ she wrote in triumph to Murray. ‘I always knew he was a tiresome parvenu & I have been doing my best to discredit him for years, he is so showy and omnipotent … What a dear delight it is to “put down the mighty from their seat”.’
The ongoing excavations offered a material parallel to Jane Harrison’s major scholarly fascination: digging down beneath the ‘layers of cult’ to retrieve a lost history of ancient Greek worship. Harrison was frustrated that her contemporaries, taking Homer’s epics as the starting point of Western literature, tended to assume that these poems also represented the earliest theology. Instead, she argued, the articulate, anthropomorphic Olympian gods of Homer and Greek tragedy – the warring and capricious family of deities dominated by the almighty, adulterous Zeus – provide no evidence of true popular religion, but are ‘the products of art and literature’, divested of their mystical and monstrous attributes and merely ‘posing as divinities’. Among her favourites of the finds she was
allowed to examine at Knossos was a clay seal which she read as ‘a veritable little manual of primitive Cretan faith and ritual’. Clearly discernible was the figure of a woman sitting atop a mountain, flanked by lions, a subject bowed down in ecstasy before her. In this image, Harrison identified an ancient ritual of mother-worship, long since hidden from history. Her discovery would shake the foundations of classical scholarship.
Harrison was not the first scholar to search for alternative cults to the Olympian pantheon. Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1872 work The Birth of Tragedy (which Harrison called ‘real genius’) had already questioned whether the apparent monopoly, as presented in literature, of the Olympian gods had any basis in the reality of ancient religious practice, while Sir James George Frazer, in his immensely popular and influential comparative study The Golden Bough (1890), had set out to show that ancient religions revolved around the worship and sacrifice of a mystic king who died at harvest and was reborn in the spring – a cycle he considered central to almost all mythology. But while both men’s work focused on male deities and archetypes, Harrison now suggested that the origins of the well-known myths lay in a much older worship, anchored in emotion and community spirit, centred around rituals designed to ward off evil and celebrate the changing seasons, and which placed the greatest importance on women.
Harrison’s major works, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and Themis (1912), drew on cutting-edge material evidence from the archaeological digs she’d personally witnessed, and revealed an array of powerful goddesses who once reigned alone over cult shrines – Hera at Argos, Athena at Athens, Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, Gaia at Delphi – but whose ancient worship had silently been replaced by later cults to Zeus, their temples renamed, their powers reattributed and their legends altered to accommodate the rationalised Olympian pantheon. These new gods, Harrison insisted, reflected not only human form but also man-made hierarchies: their rise was testament to the gradual erosion of women’s importance in Greek society. When ideology wanted to confine women to the domestic sphere, these powerful, public goddesses appeared a threat to state order: the ‘outrageous’ myth of the birth of the goddess Athena from Zeus’s head, Harrison argued, is the ‘religious representation … of a patrilinear social structure’ designed to erase the mother. Dionysus, Harrison suggested, was originally worshipped alongside his mother, Semele, an ancient Thracian earth goddess, but as society began to record lineage through a paternal line, Semele was gradually effaced and Dionysus became known as Son of Zeus.
But in early local cults, Harrison found evidence of a different world order, where descent was traced through the mother’s family, where women’s activities formed the heart of community life, and where ‘matriarchal, husbandless goddesses’ were not mocked or feared but reverently worshipped. Not only were women central to early Greek religion as objects of worship, wrote Harrison, but as active participants in religious practice too. In Prolegomena she insisted that the frenetic band of maenads who attend Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae were not invented mythical figures, but rather a literary portrait of real worshippers, whose seasonal assembly at women-only festivals was seen as central to the survival of the community at large. It was clear to her readers that Harrison was writing a version of history with serious repercussions on the present day, which mounted a forceful challenge to women’s current subordination. ‘We are so possessed by a set of conceptions based on Periclean Athens, by ideas of law and order and reason and limit,’ wrote Harrison, ‘that we are apt to dismiss as “mythological” whatever does not fit into our stereotyped picture. The husbands and brothers of the women of historical days would not, we are told, have allowed their women to rave upon the mountains.’ Writing from a women’s community, long shut out from institutions run by men, Harrison saw things differently. In fact, she notes an overlooked source citing a group of female Dionysus-worshippers in Macedonia who frightened their husbands ‘out of their senses’ by their ‘rites of possession and ecstasy’. The men, writes Harrison, were too in awe of the evident power at work to put a stop to such practices, and with good reason: ‘The women were possessed, magical, and dangerous to handle.’
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To modernist writers, Harrison’s efforts to reread history through the lens of gender and power offered fertile encouragement to their own experimentation with radical new forms. ‘Few books are more fascinating,’ wrote T. S. Eliot, who cited her work in a graduate paper at Harvard University, ‘than those of Miss Harrison … when they burrow in the origins of Greek myths and rites’; her influence can be seen permeating The Waste Land (1922), with its pungent descriptions of seasonal ritual and divination. Harrison’s insistence that art must derive from ‘a keen emotion’ sounded a clarion call to writers, including Pound and the Imagists, who were seeking ways to express feeling directly, communicate truths and ‘make it new’. Her legends of powerful, creative and vengeful women – and her compelling evidence of the way women have been systematically devalued by centuries of patriarchy – inspired others, over subsequent decades, in their creation of female characters, from E. M. Forster’s Schlegel sisters to James Joyce’s Molly Bloom, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Ramsay and D. H. Lawrence’s Brangwen women. (Lawrence read Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual a few months before he first met H. D., and told a friend that ‘it just fascinates me to see art coming out of religious yearning’, though he supposed it to have been written by ‘a school marmy woman’.) In turn, Harrison keenly followed the work of her younger contemporaries, eager to learn from them too: though she couldn’t make much sense of Ulysses, she admired the way Joyce was ‘trying to make audible, make conscious the subconscious. He is dredging the great deeps of personality. That is his tremendous contribution.’
For emerging women writers – H. D. and Virginia Woolf among them – Harrison’s work opened up exciting new artistic possibilities. As a young woman, H. D. had studied Greek on her own, translating Euripides with the help of French and English versions. She never refers to Harrison directly, but might well have read the articles praising her work in the New Freewoman in 1913; she also devoured Gilbert Murray’s studies of Greek religion, in which he summarised many of Harrison’s theories. During a Hellenic cruise in 1932, on which the Reverend Wigram, Canon of Malta, delivered lectures largely paraphrasing Prolegomena and Themis, H. D. wrote to Bryher in amazement that ‘there were mother-cults under all the Zeus cults, from Dodona, down the coast!’ The revelation was highly suggestive to H. D., who since her Mecklenburgh Square days had always been drawn to the collective female voices of Greek choruses, rather than heroic soliloquies. Her later poetry exudes a fascination with powerful mother-figures who represent creativity and love rather than war and destruction: her long-term project giving voice to ancient heroines found a parallel in Harrison’s recovery of goddesses subsumed into legends not their own.
For Woolf, too, Jane Harrison was a major influence and inspiration. Virginia and her sister Vanessa, marked out for a genteel routine of domestic duty and self-sacrifice, were not sent to school with their brothers; determined nonetheless to learn and create, they spent their days upright in their shared room, Vanessa standing at her easel, Virginia at her tall writing desk, where she worked on her Greek, which she doggedly studied at home with tutors through her teenage years. In October 1904, while Virginia was staying with her aunt in Cambridge to convalesce from her second suicide attempt, her cousin Florence Maitland took her to Newnham to meet Jane Harrison ‘and all the other learned ladies’; it’s perhaps not too farfetched to imagine that this experience solidified Woolf’s resolve, when she moved to Gordon Square later that year, to begin writing her first articles and reviews and to strike out on a public life of her own. Harrison’s work gave Woolf a new, subversive model of history which informed all her subsequent novels and essays: one whose revelations offered powerful ‘mothers’ for women to ‘think back through’, and which revealed as man-made – and flimsy – the constructs on which patriarchal
society rests. Woolf always felt set apart from the male Bloomsbury set – Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster – who had met at Cambridge and been part of an elite, exclusively male Apostles circle under the mentorship of the philosopher G. E. Moore; even in the drawing room of Gordon Square, where men and women talked freely together, the men would occasionally congregate in a corner and chuckle over a Latin joke Virginia did not understand, leaving her with a sharp pang of exclusion. (Roger Fry once said that Harrison had ‘a really Apostolic mind’, a high compliment delivered apparently without irony.) Jane Harrison offered Woolf an alternative lineage in which she could see herself reflected: a different Cambridge, a different Bloomsbury, a different approach to history, and the possibility of a different future.
Over the years she spent at Newnham, Harrison’s work flourished within a small community founded on liberal values and a firm belief in women’s intellectual equality to men. Yet her public presentation, so at odds with the sympathetic image of the deferential, motherly woman teacher, soon made her enemies across the conservative Cambridge classics faculty, where rumours flew that she was advocating ‘free love’ among Newnham women by teaching them Sappho. Grumblings were heard all over town when Harrison came out with new theories: her books were roundly attacked for extrapolating liberally from scant evidence, for their bagginess and emotive language, for an alleged feminist agenda leading to overemphasis on women’s roles, and for her ‘florid’ style, often condemned as displaying ‘an excess of sympathy’ and being ‘subjective’ or ‘propagandistic’. Critics, desperate to discredit her conclusions, linked her work with the ‘corybantic Hellenism’ of the ballerina Isadora Duncan, dismissing Harrison as a creative artist working in the modernist tradition, not as a serious historian dealing in the realm of material fact. As her time in Cambridge wore on, colleagues outside Newnham grew more virulent in their criticism. When in 1916 she postulated that the traditional Russian puppet show and the legend of the Head of John the Baptist might share an origin in ritual dance, Sir William Ridgeway (a distinguished archaeologist from Gonville & Caius, and an arch-conservative, active in the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage) wrote to M. R. James, the provost of King’s and a very influential figure in the university, to condemn ‘such an audacious, shameless avowal of charlatanism, debauching young minds wholesale’. James, in turn, published a vituperative condemnation of Harrison’s article, accusing her of every scholarly sin from a poor understanding of Latin idiom to a blasphemous attack on Christianity. But Harrison – who openly set herself against the hegemony of what she called ‘sound scholars’ – was satisfied by her contemporaries’ flustered reactions, which proved that her bold theories had made an impact. Reflecting later on Themis, from her home in Mecklenburgh Street, she wrote: ‘To the orthodox among my contemporaries, and to the younger reactionaries, Themis has appeared dangerous. Their fear is justified. A hand was laid upon their ark.’
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