Bryn
Mawr Classical Review 2003.06.14
Annabel Robinson, The Life and Work of Jane Ellen
Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Pp. xvi, 332; 18 ills. ISBN 0-19-924233-X. $70.00.
Reviewed by James P. Holoka, Eastern Michigan University
(james@holoka.com) Word count: 2131
words
Annabel Robinson has written a compelling and detailed account of
the life and career of a major figure in modern classical studies.
Born in 1850, Jane Harrison was among the first students to attend
the newly founded women's college, Newnham, at Cambridge University.
Disadvantaged, like all women of her era, by the lack of thorough
training in Greek and Latin during her earlier schooling, she
achieved only a high second (comparable to, say, a "B+") in the
Cambridge Tripos. After leaving Newnham, she worked and studied
under Charles Newton in the Department of Antiquities at the British
Museum. Within the next two decades, she gained considerable
notoriety as a brilliant and dynamic lecturer on topics relating to
classical art and archaeology, often traveling to collections and
sites in Greece and elsewhere in Europe. She had contact with
eminent German archaeologists, for example, Ernst Curtius, the
excavator of Olympia.1
Her early publications augured a distinguished academic career.
After being twice short-listed for the Yates Professorship of
Classical Archaeology at the University of London,2
she was appointed to a fellowship at her alma mater, Newnham. Very
favorable conditions of employment, requiring little lecturing or
tutorial work, freed her for travel and research, and her tenure at
Newnham (1898-1922) was in fact the apex of her scholarly career.
She published two books that espoused novel theories of Greek
religion -- Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion
(Cambridge 1903) and Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of
Greek Religion (Cambridge 1912, 2nd ed. 1927) -- both still in
print and influential despite the discrediting of their basic
premises fairly early on (see negative reviews summarized in
Robinson, 169-70, 230-32). Her stress on the importance of archaic
over classical evidence and of ritual action over written myth in
the understanding of Greek religion stimulated several other
scholars -- Gilbert Murray, F.M. Cornford, and A.B. Cook -- with
whom she collaborated and led to their identification as the
Cambridge Ritualists (though Murray was an Oxford man most of his
life); Harrison was in fact the moving spirit of the group.
Possessing tremendous energy and a lifelong youthful enthusiasm for
new ideas (she collected foreign languages like butterflies3),
she continued her scholarly work, albeit with less rigor and
originality, after retirement from Newnham, with a specific devotion
to Russian language and literature, especially folklore. In failing
health owing to cardiac and respiratory problems (exacerbated by
addiction to cigarettes through most of her adult life), she died of
leukemia in 1928.
Besides this record of specialized scholarly and academic
accomplishments, dramatic social and intellectual changes make the
background of Harrison's lifetime most fascinating. The old
Victorian gender values were gradually being discarded: in 1850,
neither of the Cambridge women's colleges -- Girton and Newnham --
had even been founded. By 1920, Oxford's Somerville (founded 1879)
was awarding degrees to women graduates (Cambridge did not follow
suit till after World War II, though the granting of titular degrees
by diploma won approval in 1921). Six months after Harrison's death,
her friend Virginia Woolf delivered lectures at Girton and Newnham,
later published as A Room of One's Own, in which she evoked
the memory of "J---- H----" and affirmed the need for equal
treatment and opportunity for women in their literary and
intellectual endeavors. ("The book is a memorial to her dead friend"
-- Robinson, 305.)
In the same period, the science of archaeology was emerging,
beginning with the sensational results of Schliemann's excavations
in the 1870s. Harrison was well-versed in the new discoveries
through both wide reading and personal acquaintance with many of the
major figures. She traveled to sites in Greece with Wilhelm D?rpfeld
and visited Arthur Evans at the Knossos excavations in 1901.
Important archaeological discoveries were subjects of her lectures
and informed her writing. In anthropology, psychology, and
philosophy, the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, W. Robertson Smith,
James Frazer, Erwin Rohde, ?mile Durkheim, William James, Sigmund
Freud, Carl Jung, and Henri Bergson influenced Harrison's ideas in
her two magna opera. Toward the end of her life, she was
reading French poetry of the utopian (and ephemeral) "Unanimist"
school as well as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot.
On the personal side, it is possible to reconstruct much from
letters and reminiscences of relatives, colleagues, friends, and
students. These reveal a woman whose childhood was unhappy: her
mother died in giving her birth, and her stepmother was a stern
Evangelical Christian -- "She was a Celt and her religion was of the
fervent semi-revivalist type."4
She left home relatively early, to attend first Cheltenham Ladies'
College and then Newnham. Her family ties were not strong. In her
relations with men, she suffered several disappointments. Though
there was a long succession of, in Hugh Lloyd-Jones's phrase,
"intellectual amiti?s amoureuses with a younger male
scholar," the strongest male attachments of her life were with
Gilbert Murray and Francis Cornford. Murray, sixteen years younger,
was already married when they met, and her close working
arrangements with him were a source of jealous anxiety for his wife.
Cornford, twenty-four years her junior, was the object of strong
feelings not entirely sublimated in their mutual scholarly
interests. His marriage to Frances Darwin, the daughter of
Harrison's longtime friend Ellen (Crofts) Darwin, inflicted a
disappointment that permanently clouded Harrison's emotional life.
She resigned herself to an unmarried state and nurtured close ties
of friendship with colleagues, students, and former students. She
lived most of the last decade of her life with Hope Mirrlees, who
was thirty-seven years younger, quite beautiful, and pathologically
possessive of Harrison.5
Despite this wealth of interesting material, there has been no
definitive biography till the present work by Annabel Robinson. Her
achievement may be better appreciated by considering the problems
confronting all of Harrison's biographers.
At age 75, Harrison wrote Reminiscences of a Student's
Life, published by the Woolfs' Hogarth Press (London 1925). This
extremely arch and witty collection of anecdotes is more pamphlet
than book and is not restricted to her early life as the title
indicates. Although virtually everything in it has been mined by
later biographers, it is of limited and problematic value because
Harrison chose not to mention any persons still living, thus
excluding information about her relationships with Murray, Cornford,
and Mirrlees, among others. Furthermore, "her Victorian demeanor
allowed no reference to the most important episodes in her life, too
intimate, too painful to share publicly" (Robinson, 300). Other bits
of autobiographical detail have been gleaned from essays collected
in Alpha and Omega (London 1915) and, particularly in
Robinson's book, from the major scholarly works themselves.
After her death in 1928, two of Harrison's former students, Hope
Mirrlees and Jessie (Crum) Stewart contemplated biographies of their
venerated teacher. Stewart's Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait from
Letters (London 1959) is based principally on the some 800 items
of Harrison's correspondence with Gilbert Murray. Though in
communication with Mirrlees and aware of her biographical project,
Stewart got little cooperation from that quarter. Mirrlees, ever
protective of her special relation to Harrison, was reluctant to
share information, reserving it for use in her own biography of her
friend and mentor.6
However, a sense of responsibility to the memory of Harrison and a
reverential reticence to disclose intimate details of her subject's
relations with others (and likely an imperfect grasp of her
scholarly work) so inhibited her that she never completed the
biography. After her death in 1978, Mirrlees' papers were deposited
in the Harrison archive at Newnham and have been a source of both
information and disinformation for subsequent biographers. Mirrlees
was also likely responsible for the loss of a massive body of
documents in 1922, when she apparently encouraged Harrison to burn
her correspondence upon her departure from Cambridge for her new
life in retirement in Paris and later London.7
Sandra Peacock, whose Jane Ellen Harrison: The Mask and the
Self appeared in 1988, had full access to the Harrison Papers in
the Newnham College Archive. Her biography8
is the first true attempt to write a full-dress life of Harrison
based on available source material and the subject's own published
works. But it is also keenly committed to a psychoanalytic approach:
for example, Harrison's early loss of her mother and supposed
competition with her stepmother for her (emotionally rather remote)
father's attentions are seen as the elements of a classic Oedipal
situation. Though this method occasionally yields suggestive
results, Peacock's book has come in for a great deal of negative
criticism.9
The broader intellectual roots and the evolution of the central
ideas of the Cambridge Ritualists are neglected in favor of Freudian
explanations of why Harrison acted and wrote as she did. These are
rarely convincing and never the whole story.10
Two very recent works have provided Robinson with both valuable
models and cautionary advice: Hugh Lloyd-Jones's "Jane Ellen
Harrison, 1850-1928" (note 2, below) and Mary Beard's The
Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, MA, 2000). The former is
an acute pr?cis of Harrison's work, predicated on the conviction
that "the history of scholarship can be written effectively only by
a real scholar" (63, n. 1). Lloyd-Jones, whom Robinson credits
prominently in her "Acknowledgements," also underscores the
influence of Harrison's writings on the thought of Pierre
Vidal-Naquet, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Marcel Detienne, and especially
Walter Burkert.11
The lengthier discussion of Harrison's work in Robinson is built on
the armature of Lloyd-Jones's incisive and evenhanded synopsis.
Mary Beard, University Lecturer in Classics at Cambridge
(Newnham), offers an extended corrective to facile biographical
assertion. In the process of reconstructing a kind of love-hate
relationship between Harrison and Eug?nie (Sellers) Strong, author
of Apotheosis and After-Life: Three Lectures on Certain Phases of
Art and Religion in the Roman Empire (London 1915), a
relationship largely ignored in previous accounts of Harrison's
life, Beard demonstrates how biographers are often too confident in
the image they have constructed of their subject. In fact, both the
subject and those acquainted with her will inevitably have engaged
in the invention of a particular persona. The paucity of evidence
(in this instance, that supplied by the Harrison Archive) and its
slanted character should instill caution: "It is precisely because
the archival resource (the Harrison Papers) that dominates research
on Harrison, the collection to which all must turn in (re)writing
her life, is so much Mirrlees' creation that it forces its readers
into collusion with her vision of her subject" (157).
Robinson is well aware of these previous appraisals of Harrison's
life and work and brings needed qualifications to her task. She has
examined all the documentary evidence for Harrison's life, citing
hundreds of letters, many not contained in the Newnham archive. A
trained classicist (B.A. Oxon.), she knows the intellectual history
of the relevant period, both narrowly in terms of classical studies
(including literary, art historical, and archaeological
components)12
and more broadly in terms of major trends in philosophy,
anthropology, sociology, and psychology. She carefully assesses the
testimony of witnesses and avoids going beyond what the evidence
will support.13
Robinson's first two chapters deal with Harrison's upbringing in
Yorkshire and her schooling at Cheltenham and at Newnham. Chapters 3
and 4 recount her early professional career working in the British
Museum, delivering the dynamic public lectures that gained her great
public notice, and writing her early books, which emphatically
placed the value of artistic evidence on a par with the literary
documents. Chapters 5-7 treat her early years at Newnham, including
her collaborations with Gilbert Murray and culminating in the
publication of Prolegomena in 1903. Chapters 8 and 9 deal
mostly with travels in Greece and with emotional strains in
Harrison's life, as Murray accepted a fellowship at New College,
Oxford, and an invitation to deliver visiting lectures at Harvard.
At the same time, her relationship with Francis Cornford was
irrevocably altered by his marriage: "there began the onset of an
emotional nightmare from which she was never to recover"
(200).14
Chapters 10-12 focus on the influences that led Harrison to write
Themis, together with an astute summary of the premises and
major themes of the book. At about this time, it was becoming clear
that the other Cambridge Ritualists were beginning to follow new
lines of inquiry. And, indeed, Harrison herself, somewhat
disillusioned with the response to her work, now found time to
participate in the "Heretics Society" and to be captivated by the
utopian French poetic movement "Unanimism." Chapter 13 recounts the
activities of Harrison's later years, when the flame of her
fascination with Greek religion was dying down and, despite failing
health, she was cultivating other, mainly Russian, interests.
Annabel Robinson's grasp of the successes and shortcomings of
previous studies of her subject's life as well as her wide learning
and good judgment make this thorough and well-written study the
closest we are likely to come to an authoritative biography of Jane
Ellen Harrison.15
Notes:
1. Harrison's familiarity with
current German scholarship generally, as can be seen in her major
works, may have surpassed that of both F.M. Cornford and Gilbert
Murray. 2. The role of gender bias in
Harrison's failure to win the post is downplayed by both William M.
Calder, "Jane Harrison's Failed Candidacies for the Yates
Professorship (1888, 1896): What Did Her Colleagues Think of Her?"
in The Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered, ed. W.M. Calder
(Atlanta 1991), 37-59 and Hugh Lloyd-Jones, "Jane Ellen Harrison,
1850-1928," in Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits, ed. E.
Shils and C. Blacker (Cambridge 1996), 34, 38: "no injustice was
done." However, Robinson (104) notes that when it was proposed (in
1888) that Harrison be authorized "occasionally [to] give lectures
for the appointed professor," two members of the committee stated
baldly in writing that "they think it undesirable that any teaching
in University College be conducted by a woman." 3. Robinson, 3: "she could, by the end of
her life, read fluently not only Greek and Latin, French and German,
but also to a lesser extent Spanish, Italian, and Russian, and had
worked hard at acquiring a knowledge of Sanskrit, Cuneiform, Hebrew
and Persian, Swedish and Icelandic"; Robert Ackerman, "Jane Ellen
Harrison: The Early Work," GRBS 13 (1972) 210, counts,
besides Russian, "three Romance, three Scandinavian, German, three
Oriental and five dead languages." 4.
"Reminiscences of a Student's Life" [orig. 1925], Arion 4
(1965) 316. 5. See Robinson, 5, on
the "darker side to this arrangement." Robinson is surely right, in
discussing the use of certain pet names in Harrison's letters to
Mirrlees, to conclude that although "some read this as an indication
of a sexual relationship between the two women, ... there is no
indication that Harrison, for her part, had any lesbian tendencies"
(242). 6. See Sandra J. Peacock,
"Appendix: Reconstructing a Life: Hope Mirrlees, Jessie Stewart, and
the Problem of Biography," in Jane Ellen Harrison: The Mask and
the Self (New Haven 1988), 245-49. 7. So Robinson 5, 129, 288. While admitting
that "Gilbert Murray accused Hope of having 'a good deal to do' with
Jane's decision to destroy her letters," Peacock (note 6, above),
247, thinks "it more likely that Jane chose that course herself" as
an effort "to escape from a painful past. Scraps of paper with
familiar handwriting, invoking bittersweet memories, probably seemed
better consigned to the fire." 8.
Originally, diss. SUNY-Binghamton 1986 (Women's History), directed
by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. 9. For
example, Lloyd-Jones (note 2, above), 64, n. 4. 10. Cf. Robinson, 110-11: "Peacock ...
claims ... Harrison's relationship with her father was always close.
Similarly, Thomas Africa ("Aunt Clegg among the Dons, or Taking Jane
Harrison at her Word" in Calder [note 2, above], 24) refers to
Harrison as the 'darling daughter of a doting widower.' However, I
can find no evidence for such a relationship after Charles
Harrison's remarriage when Jane was 5 years old. Peacock and Africa
rest their case on Freudian theory alone." Africa was a member of
Peacock's dissertation committee. 11. See further, in the same vein, Renate
Schlesier, "Jane Ellen Harrison," in Classical Scholarship: A
Biographical Encyclopedia, ed. W.W. Briggs and W.M. Calder (New
York 1990), 139: "Thanks to her life's work, one cannot imagine
Altertumswissenschaft ignoring the supreme importance of
anthropology and vase-painting for the study of the history of
religion." 12. Cf. her article "A
New Light our Elders had not Seen: Deconstructing the 'Cambridge
Ritualists,'" Echos du Monde Classique / Classical Views 42
(1988) 471-87. 13. For example:
interpreting the significance of a Christmas card drawn by Frances
(Darwin) Cornford in the style of a Greek vase-painting and showing
four figures (representing Frances Cornford, her father, her
husband, and Harrison) holding sacrificial piglets, Peacock, 160,
contends that "All the members of the group would have been familiar
with the Greek use of the pig as a symbol for female genitalia, and
Frances's drawing provides a wry commentary on each person's
[unspecified] attitude toward female sexuality -- more specifically,
toward her own sexuality." Robinson, 221, n. 38, sensibly counters
that this "ignores the parallel between the drawing and the vase
painting in Prolegomena [126, fig. 10], together with
Harrison's commentary on the pig procession, while adducing an
anachronistic Freudian reading that goes against the grain of the
sensibilities of all players involved." 14. Surprisingly, Robinson, 207, comes
close to drawing a psychoanalytic conclusion in discussing
Harrison's mental state, but cites an unpublished paper by Harry
Payne rather than Peacock's (in this particular) far more germane
psychobiography: "It is all too clear what had happened. As Harry
Payne has observed, the Cornford marriage opened up [quasi-Oedipal?]
wounds more than a half century old with the spite of a child and
without an adult's understanding. Her reaction to her father's
remarriage is understandable, but that she never got over it 'marks
the central emotional dynamic of her later life.'" Robinson later
(238 and n. 69) credits Payne, without citing a publication, with an
insight to be found passim in Peacock's biography regarding
the connection between Harrison's emotional life and her scholarly
work. 15. Besides the ten mistakes
noted on the book's included errata list, I detected another nine,
including the following that could cause misunderstanding: on 184,
n. 2, for "Greek" read "Greece"; on 221, line 28, for "Religion"
read "Literature"; on 254, line 5, for "Theseus" read "Hippolytus";
on 249, line 15, for "Ainos" and "Saghalien," read "Ainus" and
"Sakhalin," now the standard spellings in English.
|