Tag: Jane Harrison

Reminiscing on self

Publisher: McNally Editions (March 12, 2024)

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.

& still more from Mecklenburgh Sq.

This must be it surely it! The TLS podcast Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon has a bonus episode (an Apple link is the best I can do) of their extended interview with Francesca Wade about book Square Haunting that I have previously blogged on. Nothing here that she hasn’t necessarily said elsewhere, but just another nudge in the direction of reading about this really interesting collective (of four people – women) that Wade has put together (in one place – a London square).

Until I read the book, one final thought, it occurs to me how often Virginia Woolf uses “haunting” and associated words – things like “my old haunts” or “something/somebody haunted by” and of course “haunted houses” – and there is a wonderful 1927 essay entitled Street Haunting (I would guess this inspires Wade’s book title) which I know from The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays a collection published in 1942 by Leonard Woolf after his wife’s death, and which takes us on a delightful walk of London – and at the haunting hour! (A beautiful 1930 US edition is at The British Library, and here digitally.) I will keep this in mind as an idea to be pursued further, because I think there is a lot more to be said about Woolf and the ghosts that haunted her, and those that haunt us all.

More from Mecklenburgh Square

Certainly a most talked about publication in the UK at the moment! Further to my previous post, BBC Radio 3 has also given Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting (amongst other things woman, classical & academic) consideration on their Free Thinking program  or the “Goddesses of Academia” episode of their Arts & Ideas podcast.

And, yes, the Jane Harrison, Hope Mirrlees relationship which I remarked upon does indeed come up, as does her modernist poem “Paris” printed by the Hogarth Press in 1919. The British Library has digitized a first edition for all to see, and what a delight it is. Literary wise – why has Mirrlees been forgot? (perhaps because she forsook poetry for “the novel” and other interests) – and in terms of handwork – the Woolfs had only been doing this stuff for a couple of years (they bought a printing press in 1917) for goodness sake!

Interesting, is that Mirrlees’ poem spans just one day in Paris, portraying the vast, ever-changing cityscape and the tempo of a new modernity, all set against the dark shadows still cast by war and an uneasy peace. The much better known “one dayers” are a few years away – Joyce’s “Ulysses” in 1922 and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” in 1925.

Five Women & Mecklenburgh Square

Just published and brought to my notice by The Guardian, this interesting podcast from The Spectator (and embedded below) informs further on Francesca Wade’s just published first book Square Haunting (Faber, January 2020).

For the curious, the five eminent women are Virginia Woolf (writer, 1882–1941) Hilda Doolittle (or H.D. writer, poet 1886–1961), Dorothy L Sayers (writer, 1893–1957), Eileen Power (economist, historian 1889–1940) and Jane Harrison (classicist, 1850–1928), and the place is Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury, London. Wade presumably explores the changing role of women at the beginning of the 20th century through these exemplary lives, and in doing so discovers shared aspects of their lives.

Jane Ellen Harrison, Newnham College (Augustus John)

Without referring to either book or podcast, off the top of my head I actually know of one obscure more than crossing of paths, being that between Woolf and Harrison. Virginia Woolf’s diaries (favourite often returned to reading of mine) reveal something of the relationship between her friend Hope Mirrlees and Mirrlees’ former tutor and then partner Harrison — their shared domestic and working lives and travels abroad. The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press in fact published Harrison’s memoirs in 1925.

Also, while Eileen Power may draw a blank with some (or many) I have actually come across Medieval English Nunneries in another context … but there must surely be more to tell, and I am looking forward to reading about it.