In an LRB piece (Vol. 46 No. 17 · 12 September 2024) coming out of the publication earlier this year of a new edition of the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison’s Reminiscences of a Student’s Life: A Memoir (first published in 1925 towards the end of her life), Mary Beard ponders the Harrison life stories as told by her, to be retold by others until the varied accounts thereof fused to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Or perhaps not. And if not, who cares, for Harrison’s life was remarkable in every way irrespective of questionable veracity, mischievous embellishment or the self-interested spin. Harrison knew that a woman of her time had to control their own narrative or no one else would – or worse, could easily find itself appropriated by a … bloke!
This is not the first time Mary Beard has considered Jane Harrison. She too is of course a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, where Harrison studied, was rejected by, and returned to – to become the archetype for generations of women academics. And, Professor Beard in fact hunted through archival material for her own book, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Harvard University Press) in 2000. (A review from the time at The Guardian can be read here.)
If written words are not enough, the LRB also included a conversation with Mary Beard about her article in their podcast (available on their website or embedded below from Spotify) where Harrison is stylized as ‘the cleverest woman in England’ (of that time).
I too have mentioned Jane Harrison before – here and again here, for instance, in respect to her being one of a particular group of intellectual women who happened to live for a time on Mecklenburgh Square in London, and as written about by Francesca Wade in her book Square Haunting (2020). Another of those was of course Virginia Woolf, and the Woolfs attendance at Harrison’s funeral (on 19th April 1928) is recorded in a 21st April 1928 diary entry that I make note of here. This, an event that does not appear to have moved VW terribly much but, just as she has afforded others who touched upon her world, her memorializing of Harrison is other – for her, a guest appearance in A Room of One’s Own. And what a memorial that is; one that assures a recognition beyond her time into the present.