Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  ‘To be a heretic’ – She was a founding member of the Cambridge Heretics, a society for discussion of art, philosophy and religion. This lecture, ‘Heresy and Humanity’, was read at a 1909 meeting.

  burned all her papers – Annabel Robinson writes that Harrison was ‘disastrously prevailed upon by Hope Mirrlees to make a bonfire of all the letters and papers she had saved over the years. These included not only all the correspondence she had received from Gilbert Murray, but also letters from Burne-Jones and others of her distinguished London friends. Perhaps Mirrlees’s motive was simply to be unencumbered, but there lurks behind this event a more disturbing possibility, also indicated by Mirrlees’s later behaviour in regard to Harrison: the desire to make a clean break with her past life and to embark on a new one where she, Hope Mirrlees, would be the central figure.’ Hope herself seems not to have known about the contents of the bonfire: she wrote to Jessie Stewart in 1933 that ‘I mentioned to Professor Murray as a possibility (it occurred to me a few weeks ago) that his answers might be among Jane’s things stored with Mappy’s Mount Blow furniture … However, I told him quite frankly that I don’t for a moment think they really are there. I think Jane would have said something to me about them if she had kept them. Because at the time that she was tearing everything up she used to show me anything she thought would amuse me – & I certainly had the impression that she was making a complete holocaust.’

  ‘to live in’ – The Cornford Letters. Newnham.

  motherly mentor – She hints at this, without naming names, in her essay ‘Crabbed Age and Youth’, in JEH, Alpha and Omega, p. 21.

  ‘as if he’ – Jessie G. Stewart, Jane Ellen Harrison, p. 112.

  ‘sort of unmarried-married life’ – The Cornford Letters. Newnham.

  her health failed – In 1903, Harrison suffered shortness of breath and fainting, and was told to give up smoking: ‘Ugh! If giving up drink is like the wrench from a lover whom all the time you despise, giving up smoking is like parting from the best friend, who always comforts and never torments!’

  ‘just now faced’ – JEH to Frances Darwin, 1908–09. Quoted in Robert Ackerman, ‘Some Letters of the Cambridge Ritualists’, pp. 121–4.

  ‘a typical’ – VW to Lady Cecil, 1 September 1925.

  ‘Thank you’ – JEH to HM, 3 July 1910. Newnham.

  ‘that is only’ – JEH to Lina Mirrlees, undated (c. 1910). Newnham.

  biographers have – Robinson suggests Mirrlees had ‘few of Harrison’s intellectual gifts’, and writes that ‘I cannot help suspecting that her friendship with Harrison was fuelled by a craving for fame-by-association, as it were, since there is little else to explain their close relationship’. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by contrast, Gertrude Stein refers to Harrison as ‘Hope Mirrlees’s pet enthusiasm’.

  long poem Paris – Suffused with sights and sounds, Paris evokes a stream-of-consciousness walk through the streets on a single day; in a rich collage of allusive fragments, symbols of the city’s past and present are mixed in with the speaker’s own internal monologue. Mirrlees presents a noisy, surreal vision of modernity, mingling brand names and musical scores, advertisement posters and snippets of conversation, the ghosts of the Père Lachaise Cemetery and the pigeons perched on statues. It is a powerfully evocative snapshot of the city still in mourning for its war dead, yet on the cusp of a new future as diplomats arrive for the peace conference at Versailles. Above all, Paris is a tribute to the bustling metropolis and its constantly renewing life force.

  ‘has a passion’ – VW to Lady Cecil, 1 September 1925.

  ‘It’s all Sapphism’ – VW to Clive Bell, 24 September 1919.

  ‘spoilt prodigy’ – VW, diary 23 November 1920.

  ‘knows Greek’ – VW to Margaret Llewelyn Davies, 17 August 1919.

  ‘influence was hardly’ – Hope Mirrlees: biography research. Newnham.

  first taken up – Hope and Jane’s Russian teacher was Nadine Jarintzov, who had come to Britain from St Petersburg in the 1890s. She was a proponent of sex education, an art critic and an author, and Harrison wrote a preface to her book Russian Poets and Poems: ‘Madame Jarintzov in her former book made me and every student of Russian her debtor. She expounded for us, she realised as only a Russian could, the Russian spirit. Now she goes further; by her translations she recreates that spirit.’ The book was published by Blackwell in July 1917, while Dorothy L. Sayers was with the company; ‘Madame Jarintzov’ was present at the dinner party at Basil Blackwell’s where Sayers was proposed to by Leonard Hodgson.

  ‘cares more’ – JEH to Gilbert Murray, October 1914. Newnham.

  ‘for our new’ – JEH to HM, 28 August 1914. Newnham. In the Manchester Guardian of 23 December 1914, Harrison joined Henry James, H. G. Wells, Constance Garnett and others in signing a letter ‘To Russian Men of Letters’ expressing solidarity ‘at this moment when your countrymen and ours are alike facing death for the deliverance of Europe’.

  ‘It is too fascinating’ – JEH to Gilbert Murray, May 1915. Newnham.

  In a lecture – Harrison began teaching Russian almost as soon as she began learning it, and also argued for Russian’s inclusion in the Cambridge syllabus: ‘An accurate knowledge of the Russian and Greek languages together with an intimate understanding of the two civilisations should furnish a humanistic education at once broad and thorough.’ She visited Russia only once – in September 1886 with her cousin Marian Harrison, long before her interest in Russian culture had developed – and later regretted that she had spent all her time looking at Greek vases in the Hermitage Museum: ‘What a fool, what an idiot I was to leave Russia without knowing it! I might so easily have made the pilgrimage to Tolstoy; I might even have seen Dostoevsky … Never now shall I see Moscow and Kiev, cities of my dreams.’ She did once, however, give Turgenev a tour of Newnham. ‘Dare I ask him to speak just a word or two of Russian? He looked such a kind old snow-white Lion. Alas! He spoke fluent English; it was a grievous disappointment.’

  ‘growing richer’ – JEH, ‘Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos’, p. 5.

  ‘If Esperanto’ – JEH, ‘Epilogue on the War’, Alpha and Omega, pp. 246–7.

  ‘far famed’ – JEH, ‘Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos’, p. 7.

  ‘which melt into’ – Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 104.

  ‘Each of us’ – JEH, ‘Unanimism and Conversion’, Alpha and Omega, p. 48.

  ‘all the recent’ – HM, ‘An Earthly Paradise’, Time and Tide, 25 February 1927.

  ‘was where the’ – Gertrude Stein, Paris France, p. 11.

  the Left Bank – John Cournos wrote to John Gould Fletcher from Paris, 26 April 1924, telling him that the Russians drink at the Rotonde cafe on Boulevard Montparnasse, the Americans and English at the Dôme opposite. ‘The Russians here look alive; they have every appearance of being virile and of being creatively interested in the life of the time, such as it is; the Americans seem dull, bored, sodden with drink.’

  ‘Cubism is now’ – HM to Lina Mirrlees, 17 November 1922. Newnham HM.

  ‘owing to Pellerin’s churlishness’ – HM to Lina Mirrlees, 17 November 1922. Newnham HM.

  ‘to wear with’ – HM to Lina Mirrlees, 2 November 1922. Newnham HM.

  ‘Sapphic flat’ – VW to Molly MacCarthy, 22 April 1923. Woolf’s reference to their ‘Sapphic flat’ was omitted from the edition of her letters that was published while Mirrlees was alive.

  ‘I feel that’ – D. H. Lawrence to S. S. Koteliansky, 1 May 1917.

  ‘All along’ – JEH to Mary Murray, 25 December 1922. Newnham.

  ‘uses too many’ – JEH to Gilbert Murray, 22 January 1916. Newnham.

  During his stint – Alexei Remizov to John Cournos, 11 June 1924. Amherst.

  In August – Charles du Bos to HM, 3 January 1930: ‘I am glad that it is Prince Mirsky who is giving the Jane Harrison lecture: the picture of you three working at Pontigny in the “halle romane” at
the Avvakum translation comes back vividly before my mind’s eye.’ Jacques Doucet.

  the 1917 Club – In Dorothy L. Sayers’s novel Clouds of Witness, Lord Peter Wimsey’s sister Mary is a member of the Soviet Club on Gerrard Street, a headquarters indicated by ‘an orange door, flanked by windows with magenta curtains’. The club was ‘founded to accommodate free thinking rather than high living’, and Wimsey’s mother complains at her children haunting ‘low places full of Russians and sucking Socialists taking themselves seriously … and given to drinking coffee and writing poems with no shape to them, and generally ruining their nerves’.

  ‘the greatest writer’ – VW to Lytton Strachey, 1 September 1912.

  ‘savage-joyful’ – The Times, 24 June 1911.

  Boris Anrep – His mosaics featuring his friends, including Virginia Woolf, as Greek muses adorn the entrance hall to the National Gallery.

  ‘whose short curls’ – David Garnett, The Golden Echo, p. 6. Garnett considered Harrison, along with Arthur Waley, ‘the greatest scholar I have known’.

  ‘together with Freud’ – D. S. Mirsky, Jane Ellen Harrison and Russia, p. 9.

  ‘immensely impressed’ – JEH to D. S. Mirsky, September 1924. Newnham.

  ‘Oh dear!’ – JEH to D. S. Mirsky, November 1924. Newnham.

  ‘draw your inspiration’ – JEH, ‘Epilogue on the War’, Alpha and Omega, p. 238. The following quotes are also from this essay.

  ‘our delightful Club’ – JEH to D. S. Mirsky, 9 May 1925. Newnham.

  ‘the size of’ – JEH to D. S. Mirsky, undated (January 1926). Newnham.

  ‘queer little house’ – 11 Mecklenburgh Street was the birthplace in 1845 of Henry Sweet, the phonetician who was the model for Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.

  ‘We have taken’ – JEH to Gilbert Murray, undated (September 1926). Newnham.

  ‘a servant is’ – HM to Lina Mirrlees, 15 October 1922. Newnham HM.

  already knew – Jane had met Lytton Strachey in 1909 at a sanatorium at Saltsjöbaden, where they were both undergoing Swedish massage as a cure for various ailments. Jane remembered the meeting with fondness: ‘“Take my advice,” he said; “as soon as they touch you begin to yell, and go on yelling till they stop.” It was sound advice, sympathetically given. I learnt then, for the first time, how tender, if how searching, is the finger Mr. Strachey lays on our human frailties.’ In 1905, she went on a bicycling holiday with Roger Fry in Normandy. He remembered that ‘it was the fashion then for women to bicycle in bloomers, but Jane had invented a costume for herself consisting of tight breeches and Bishop’s apron. She was very pleased with it herself, but the Frogs thought it extremely outré. The following year she almost caused a riot when she appeared in this garb at the Gare du Nord.’

  ‘When I knew’ – Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 204.

  ‘Knowing my’ – JEH to D. S. Mirsky, 21 November 1924. Newnham.

  ‘there are few’ – JEH, Themis, p. 450.

  ‘full of them’ – Frances Partridge, Love in Bloomsbury, p. 60.

  ‘the emotional’ – D. S. Mirsky, Jane Ellen Harrison and Russia, p. 10.

  ‘the OO’ – Notebook of Bear Facts. Newnham HM.

  in subtle dedication – Harrison’s Epilegomena (1921) has an Arabic dedication to Hope; Hope’s novel Madeleine uses a quote from Ancient Art and Ritual as the epigraph for its final chapter.

  ‘fantastic dramas’ – JEH and HM, The Book of the Bear, p. xii.

  ‘We chose’ – JEH to Gilbert Murray, undated (September 1926). Newnham.

  ‘The Bear never’ – JEH to Jessie Stewart, 30 December 1926. Newnham.

  ‘a long essay’ – ‘Some Aspects of the Art of Alexey Mikhailovich Remizov’, reprinted in Parmar (ed.), HM, Collected Poems.

  ‘I have lost’ – JEH to Gilbert Murray, August 1924 (misdated 1923 by Stewart). Newnham.

  ‘Slav soul’ – D. S. Mirsky, Jane Ellen Harrison and Russia, pp. 9–11.

  poverty-stricken exile – Her last letter to Seraphima, written shortly before her death, expressed profound grief that her medical expenses had so impoverished her that she could not send the money Seraphima had evidently requested. As late as 1933, Mirrlees sent a small royalty cheque for the use of Remizov’s bear stories in an anthology for schools.

  ‘I had a book’ – JEH to Gilbert Murray, 16 May 1927. Newnham.

  ‘deeply interesting’ – JEH to D. S. Mirsky, 29 January 1926. Newnham.

  in-fighting – Mirsky, who described himself in 1925 as an ‘anti-communist’, became increasingly pro-Soviet. By 1931 he had begun writing a biography of Lenin and joined the Communist Party. He returned to Russia in 1932 under the patronage of Maxim Gorky, but after Gorky’s death in 1936 he was arrested and deported to a labour camp, where he is thought to have died in 1939. One of the last pieces he wrote before leaving England was a denunciation of the bourgeois morals of many Bloomsbury writers, including Virginia Woolf, to her dismay (‘I’m hated & despised & ridiculed’).

  ‘The way walked’ – D. S. Mirsky, Jane Ellen Harrison and Russia, p. 4.

  ‘the richest civilisation’ – JEH to HM, January 1921. Newnham.

  the work of Dante – In Prolegomena, she had written about an inscribed tablet of thin gold, which she had found in a tomb in Naples in 1902, and which signalled allegiance to the widespread cult of the god Orpheus. The tablet contained instructions for the conduct of the dead in the underworld, ordering the soul to avoid a well called Lethe (named for the goddess who takes away any recollection of mortal sin) and instead drink from one flowing from Mnemosyne (who recovers the memory of good deeds in life, and thus renders immortality). At that time, Francis Cornford had alerted her to a similar story in Dante’s Purgatorio of the dead being washed on their way to heaven in two rivers named Lethe and Eunoe. She had wondered where this second name (generally considered a Dantean neologism) had come from, and had speculated that it could be a survival of the word ‘Ennoia’, which she had seen on another Orphic tablet. Her researches had stalled until she began learning Persian and came across a book entitled Islam and the Divine Comedy, written in 1926 by the Spanish scholar Miguel Asín Palacios. Reading this, she grew convinced that Dante’s work derived many of its elements from early Iranian tradition, and suddenly wondered whether Orphic ritual (‘that strange un-Greek eschatology’) might be traced to the same sources. The possibility enthralled her: ‘Of course it has often enough been suggested that Orphism had oriental elements. But I believe now that in the case of Eunoe – Ennoia – we can clinch the matter with a definite instance.’ Intriguingly – and inexplicably – a copy of this letter from Harrison to Murray is among Dorothy L. Sayers’s papers at Wheaton College.

  ‘upset the whole’ – JEH to Gilbert Murray, 22 August 1926. Newnham.

  ‘Bother my vile body’ – JEH to Gilbert Murray, 1 September 1926. Newnham.

  ‘to re-write the mysteries’ – idem.

  ‘Nothing Doing’ – JEH to Jessie Stewart, 30 December 1926. Newnham.

  ‘a stream of’ – Hope Mirrlees: biography research. Newnham.

  ‘went right down’ – JEH to Gilbert Murray, 8 January 1928. Newnham.

  Thomas Hardy’s funeral – Virginia Woolf, who had prepared a major obituary of Hardy for the TLS back in 1919, also attended. During the service her mind wandered and she began planning the lecture that would become A Room of One’s Own.

  ‘ungracious’ – Victoria de Bunsen to Jessie Stewart, quoted in Annabel Robinson, The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison, p. 304.

  ‘which as a rule’ – HM to Seraphima Remizov, 28 April 1928. Amherst.

  ‘Dear N. V.’ – Seraphima Remizov to HM, undated. Amherst.

  ‘crossing the graveyard’ – VW, diary 17 April 1928.

  ‘It was only’ – HM to Valerie Eliot, 5 January 1965. Woolf’s letter actually read: ‘Anyhow, what a comfort for you to have been all you were to her.’ VW to HM, 17 April 1928. Maryland. />
  ‘delightful old ladies’ – Interview with Jane Harrison, Time and Tide, 27 January 1928.

  ‘You cannot be’ – JEH, ‘Crabbed Age and Youth’, Alpha and Omega, p. 17.

  in A Room – Woolf gave the lecture ‘A Room of One’s Own’ at Newnham on 20 October 1928; one week later, on Saturday, 27 October 1928, friends gathered at the college to hear Gilbert Murray give the inaugural Jane Harrison Lecture.

  ‘I had not’ – Lytton Strachey to Roger Fry, 18 April 1928. Quoted in Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, p. 1026.

  EILEEN POWER

  ‘by the study’ – Albert Kahn Foundation for the Foreign Travel of American Teachers. Reports, volume 1, issue 1, 1912.

  ‘an enlightened French’ – Guy Fletcher, ‘World History’, Radio Times, 21 June 1933.

  ‘defeat the objects’ – EP to George Coulton, 27 April 1920. Girton.

  ‘enjoyed the novel’ – EP, diary 24 December 1920. CUL.

  ‘I would not’ – EP to George Coulton, 31 July 1921. Girton.

  ‘saintly’ – EP, ‘Mahatma Gandhi’s Boycott: another view’. CUL.

  ‘I found myself’ – EP, Report to the Trustees, undated. CUL.

  ‘more stridently’ – EP, journal, 1920–1. CUL.

  ‘the historical textbook’ – EP, diary 10–12 May 1921. CUL.

  ‘that China can’ – EP, Report to the Trustees. CUL.

  ‘The A. K. fellowship’ – EP to George Coulton, 5 September 1925. Girton.

  ‘I never felt’ – EP to Lilian Knowles, 24 December 1921. LSE.

  ‘the thing which’ – EP to Lilian Knowles, 3 April 1922. LSE.

  bevy of journalists – The scene is beautifully described in Dora Russell’s autobiography, The Tamarisk Tree.

  Margery Spring Rice – née Margery Garrett, author of Working-Class Wives, the classic account of women’s lives in the 1930s; and niece of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Millicent Garrett Fawcett.

  ‘I thought it’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 31 July 1921. Girton.