Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  Jane Harrison’s presence in the Cambridge classics faculty was a challenge to the status quo, whereby women’s access to knowledge remained a source of discomfort. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the study of ancient Greek was a marker of social status, taught in public schools to boys who were expected to go on to hold positions of power and influence. As such, the classics came to signify an intellectual territory unassailable for women and the working classes, an emblem of their exclusion from systems of power. ‘I’d give ten years of my life to know Greek,’ muses Clarissa Dalloway, the upper-class wife who wants for nothing except an education, in Virginia Woolf’s debut novel, The Voyage Out. For women, ‘knowing Greek’ meant far more than a good memory for grammar and vocabulary; as girls’ education became increasingly formalised, learning an ancient language provided not only a challenge and a pleasure, but also a way for women to assert their intellectual standing.

  In her essay ‘Scientiae Sacra Fames’, Harrison wrote of the ‘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 … the rapture of reconstructing for the first time in imagination a bit of the historical past’. Women’s education had so long been constructed around its practical application to the life of a wife and mother that choosing a subject for pure stimulation felt like an act of delicious daring. Harrison considered ‘freedom to know’ to be the ‘birthright of every human being’; she was furious when it was implied that any realm of knowledge should be considered ‘unwomanly’. The memory of a Greek grammar book being confiscated by an aunt – who tartly reminded Jane she would have no use for it when she had a ‘home of her own’ – rankled for the rest of her life: ‘She was a little girl, and thereby damned to eternal domesticity; she heard the gates of the temple of Learning clang as they closed.’ These clanging gates find an echo in A Room of One’s Own, where the doors of the Cambridge library slam shut on Woolf as the officious beadle confiscates the key. In her essay, Woolf transforms the cloying servility of that ‘home’ – where women’s interests are sidelined – into a vision of a new living space, and by extension a new society, where such scholarly interests can be celebrated and nurtured. Harrison’s example made that transformation seem possible to Woolf, writing in 1928. But two decades earlier, as the voices of Harrison’s detractors grew ever louder, she began to question her position at the university.

  Harrison was well aware that the backlash against her – her works dismissed for flawed logic and an overflow of emotion – employed many of the same arguments that were still being used to deny women any education at all. In an increasingly impassioned series of essays written between 1909 and 1914, published as Alpha and Omega, Harrison demanded that we must ‘free women’ from the idea that ‘man’ connotes humanity and ‘woman’ does not; over and over she insisted that it was dangerous to the whole of society to ‘confine man or woman within the limits of sex’. ‘We must free women before we know what they are fit for intellectually and morally,’ she insisted. ‘We women may have all to go back into the harem tomorrow for the good of the race. If so, back we must go in the name of science. But, again in the name of science, we are not going till the experiment has been tried.’ Like Dorothy L. Sayers, Harrison was always swift to contradict any suggestion that men’s and women’s brains were suited to different sorts of knowledge or work: in a thought that may have influenced Woolf’s idea of the androgynous brain, she praised the ancient worshippers of Orpheus, who ‘made their god in the image of neither male nor female, but a thing bisexed, immaculate, winged, and – this is the interesting thing for us – looking out on the world four-eyed’. Harrison’s convictions revolved around ideas of power; bolstered by the archaeological evidence for women’s importance to ancient community life, she argued that the virtues commonly considered ‘womanly’ are ‘the outcome, not of sex, but of status’, and wrote that ‘to be set in authority over a fellow human being, as man has been set over woman, is a serious spiritual danger’. As 1914 approached, she began, like Woolf and H. D., to connect the tyrannies of patriarchy explicitly with the militarism now threatening to destroy society.

  Like H. D., Harrison was deeply depressed by the outbreak of the First World War, the alacrity with which many of her colleagues joined up and wrote in its support, and the patriotic fervour that swept Britain: ‘With every fibre of body and mind, I stand for Peace,’ she wrote. Harrison’s simple belief that women should be accepted as human soon became a denunciation of dominion in all its forms, founded on the conviction that ‘freedom for ourselves must involve freedom for others’ – of any race or nation. Now her ongoing spat with Sir William Ridgeway turned personal. When Harrison delivered a rousing speech arguing for Bertrand Russell – expelled from his lectureship at Trinity College for his anti-conscription activism – to have his punishment revoked, Ridgeway publicly condemned Newnham as ‘a notorious centre of Pro-German agitation’ and refused one of Harrison’s students entry to his class because she was a member of the pacifist Union of Democratic Control.

  But Harrison was unswerving in the face of such challenges from the conservative establishment: ‘To be a heretic today,’ she wrote, ‘is almost a human obligation.’ She saw ‘the rejection of traditional faiths and customs’ as a prerequisite for intellectual freedom, not possible in a conservative society in thrall to the past and to power. War, to her, represented the natural result of a ‘herd’ society where blind faith and homogeneity are prized over reason, where a dominant class, unchallenged in their ‘power to compel’, can lead their subordinates into dangerous actions with unconscionable consequences. Hatred of arbitrary authority lay at the heart of all Jane Harrison’s work, from her critique of the Olympian gods to her dislike of institutional religion. But her convictions stood starkly at odds with everything that, outside of its women’s colleges, Cambridge represented: a university with ecclesiastical foundations, a bastion of elite male privilege for generations, with unchecked power – the university could elect its own MP, voted for by alumni, while its vice chancellor could overrule local jurisdiction – built into its constitution.

  Harrison’s unladylike penchant for free thinking disturbed the establishment. To reactionaries such as Ridgeway and James, she stood for the threats to religion, the British Empire and male supremacy which they associated with unwelcome modernity. Increasingly, she began to feel cloistered at Newnham, ground down by the constant reminders that its members were not equal. She was especially frustrated by Cambridge’s ongoing refusal to grant women degrees, even after Oxford changed its rules in 1920. ‘Sometimes I feel that the virtue fostered among us is conformity,’ she wrote wearily to Murray, outlining the continued pressure on Newnham staff and students to prove their worth to men. ‘I don’t suppose you realise how convention and all the conservative virtues are canonised in a women’s college … I don’t think it is quite our own fault that our virtues are mainly those of slaves but they are – nice well-educated slaves but still slaves.’ A first motion on women’s degrees had failed in 1897, the year before Harrison returned to Newnham, when truculent alumni and an army of country parsons (who retained voting rights based on an ancient university statute) were shepherded in to cast their votes against. In October 1921, a watered-down proposal to offer honorary degrees to women students was once again rejected. Following the vote, a jeering mob of male undergraduates marched on Newnham, vandalising the college gates.

  Harrison was furious at Cambridge’s intransigence, and could put up with it no longer. She decided that her intellectual interests should henceforth be pursued outside the university, where ‘much of our ingenuity & energy goes in cringing’: rather than remain at Cambridge as a second-class citizen, Harrison began to imagine a new life, in a place where traditions could be challenged and assumptions interrogated. Since the war, her focus had shifted from ancient religion towards a wider fascination for the human mind – for Freudian psychology
and Russian literature, the philosophy of language and contemporary art. In Reminiscences, she admitted that she felt she had ‘lived too long the strait Academic life with my mind intently focused on the solution of a few problems’ and that she ‘wanted before the end came to see things more freely and more widely’. But leaving Cambridge, aged seventy-two, represented more than a desire to learn and travel: it was a determination to establish a way of life where her refusal to conform would be valued. Not many people in their seventies would consider such a dramatic change, let alone go through with it, but Harrison was convinced that life had more to offer her – and that she had more to give. It was time to abandon the staid academy and start afresh in an international metropolis, where politics and art were thriving, and where new ideas were welcomed with delight. In 1922, Harrison departed for Paris, where she would spend three years before settling, finally, in London at 11 Mecklenburgh Street. Before she left, she burned all her papers – obliterating all traces of her former life. We can’t know whether the bonfire was impetuous or premeditated, but this dramatic act of destruction ensured that when Harrison set out to reshape her life, she did so free from any physical reminders of the past. Her friends sent her off with a fund of £325 and a cheerful note congratulating Harrison on her triumphant rebirth. Of all her colleagues, only Ridgeway refused to contribute to her farewell present.

  *

  Her departure from Cambridge, as well as signalling new intellectual opportunity, offered a chance for Harrison to reflect on how she wanted to live her private life, and with whom she wanted to share it. Over the years, Harrison had experienced various romantic disappointments: while an undergraduate, she had been led to expect a proposal from her supervisor, Henry Butcher, who had omitted to mention he was already engaged to someone else; later, she had tentatively agreed to marry the classical scholar R. A. Neil, who died suddenly of appendicitis in 1901. In time, she played down these setbacks, explaining that she had ultimately chosen ‘to live in the things of the mind and to find my great joy and peace there’. Unlike H. D. and Sayers, who were a generation younger, Harrison didn’t agonise over finding a partnership of equals; by this point she was steadfast in her conviction that marriage, experimental or otherwise, was not for her. Just as Harriet Vane in Gaudy Night muses that perhaps ‘one oughtn’t to marry anybody, unless one’s prepared to make him a full-time job’, Harrison valued her hard-won independence too highly to risk it. ‘Marriage, for a woman at least,’ she wrote in Reminiscences, ‘hampers the two things that made life to me glorious – friendship and learning … The role of wife and mother is no easy one; with my head full of other things I might have dismally failed.’

  Jane Harrison with H. F. Stewart, Gilbert Murray and Francis Cornford, circa 1909.

  Nonetheless, Harrison maintained a series of extraordinarily intense relationships across her life, with men and women who shared her scholarly passions. During her time in Cambridge, she was especially close to her younger colleague Francis Cornford, but their intimacy cooled in 1909, when he announced his engagement to Frances Darwin. After Cornford’s marriage, Harrison never spoke of her feelings for him, and her friends knew to avoid the subject; in Harrison’s archive, the story can be reconstructed in outline through various dark allusions to ‘beautiful happiness’ in their shared work, uncomfortable gossip at Newnham and her dismay, when he wrote formally to thank her for helping him find his path, at realising she was considered merely a motherly mentor figure.

  It’s been generally assumed that Harrison’s disappointment lay in deep-seated hopes of marrying Cornford herself. But all other indications of her attitudes to marriage suggest that this was not the case. Later, Cornford complained to his wife that Harrison had treated him ‘as if he were a lover who had abandoned her’. But to Harrison, the betrayal was something more complex. She didn’t want to sign herself over to a husband (it’s hard to imagine this self-proclaimed heretic promising to obey anyone at an altar), but she had grown reliant on Cornford for their comfortable ‘sort of unmarried-married life’, both independent, yet utterly committed to their shared work, a purpose each considered higher than themselves. Now, she was saddened and frustrated that his marriage not only drew a boundary around their friendship, but also spelled an end to their close working partnership. Distracted by domestic bliss – including the birth, in quick succession, of five children – Cornford no longer had unlimited time to pore over hieroglyphs and cuneiform late into the night, or accompany Harrison on a whim to archaeological excursions or to seaside rest cures when her health failed. When he joined the army in 1914, revealing a longstanding enthusiasm for musketry, his renunciation of their intellectual camaraderie was complete. Writing to Frances Darwin at the time of the engagement, Harrison admitted that she was ‘just now faced by the blank unalterable fact that for more than 6 months Francis has not cared & could not care at all for the work that has been for years our joint life & friendship’. Yet Harrison was able to recognise that she expected too much of a colleague, gently adding that she bore Frances no ill-feeling: ‘you could as yet not understand, nor can he, how – late in life – work & friendship come to be the whole of life.’

  Harrison thrived on the company of a committed sparring partner; being without one sent her into spirals of depression. But over her last years at Newnham, she found someone who was willing to devote herself wholeheartedly to the relationship, and whose fidelity would be the mainstay of Harrison’s new life away from Cambridge. The major relationship of Jane Harrison’s later life offered her a radical alternative to marriage, an intellectual stimulus and a fresh energy for new collaborations. This was with Hope Mirrlees, a Newnham pupil thirty-seven years her junior, with whom Harrison lived, worked and travelled from around 1915 until her death in 1928 in their shared home on Mecklenburgh Street.

  Hope Mirrlees, wrote Virginia Woolf (who knew her through Karin Costelloe, who was married to Woolf’s brother Adrian Stephen and was Hope’s closest friend from college), came from ‘a typical English family, devoted, entirely uncultured, owning motor cars’. Descended on one side from aristocrats and on the other from sugar entrepreneurs, Mirrlees had arrived at Newnham in 1910, having quit a drama course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She was engaged at the time to the illustrator Henry Justice Ford, a stout and awkward friend of the family who was fifty to her twenty-three; when the arrangement was dissolved, Jane Harrison wrote politely to advise her that the following term’s text would be The Odyssey. ‘Thank you for writing to tell me about your engagement,’ she added. ‘I am relieved it is ended – for tho “pedestrian love” is a good & great thing it is not quite enough I think … Anyhow I am truly glad we shall have you at Newnham next autumn.’ Later that year, she admitted to Hope’s mother (who, to be near her daughter, had taken a house in Cambridge, where Harrison visited the family for dinner) that she was sad her lessons with Hope were over, but that ‘that is only the end of one chapter I hope. In some ways when the relation of teacher & taught is past, it is easier to get to know one another.’ This marked the start of the relationship which would lead Harrison to refer to Mirrlees, in her autobiography, as a ‘ghostly daughter’ – a phrase that not only highlights their close bond, but also suggests something otherworldly about Mirrlees, hinting at the complex layers to a relationship which cannot easily be defined.

  Jane Harrison’s Cambridge friends were always deeply suspicious of Mirrlees, whom they blamed for the bonfire Harrison made of her papers when the pair left Cambridge together in 1922, and whose stubborn gatekeeping during Harrison’s last illness left them feeling excluded and perplexed. Their desire to minimise her significance in Harrison’s life has influenced later assessments of their intimacy: biographers have suggested that Mirrlees sought fame by association with Harrison, used her company as cover to persuade her anxious parents to let her travel abroad, or merely served as Harrison’s assistant and companion in old age, managing her affairs and controlling her movements. Mirrlees has been
portrayed in turn as predator and victim, as manipulator and as parasite, just as Bryher’s significant career as a writer and publisher has often been downplayed in narratives that see her merely as a silent midwife to H. D.’s dominant talent. Not only do such accounts underestimate Mirrlees – an accomplished poet and novelist in her own right, whose long poem Paris has recently been hailed as a lost modernist masterpiece – but they also diminish the deep affection and intellectual compatibility which made this partnership the foundation for the variety of exciting new projects on which Harrison embarked in the 1920s.