Iron in the Soul

In​ 1921, Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick Cambridge classicist and celebrity public intellectual, was introduced to the crown prince of Japan when he came to receive an honorary degree from the university. She revisited this occasion a few years later in her memoir, Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. ‘If you must curtsey to a man young enough to be your grandson,’ she wrote, ‘it is at least some consolation to know that he believes himself to be God … The prince was good enough to say his own royal name to me two or three times, but alas! I forgot it.’ This was a typical Harrison response: wry, more than a little patronising, and – as Daniel Mendelsohn puts it in his introduction to a reissue of Reminiscences – ‘spiky’. ‘Hirohito’ was the name she insisted that she couldn’t (be bothered to) remember.

By the time of this royal visit, Harrison had long been well known as a Cambridge – and national – pioneer. In 1874, she had been one of the earliest students at the newly established Newnham College and, in a classic case of that elite English over-confidence in their ability to rank people, she had been lumbered with the reputation of being ‘the cleverest woman in England’. That reputation did not bring instant success, for at the end of her Cambridge undergraduate course she was passed over for a teaching job at Newnham in favour of a much safer (and meeker) candidate. But after a couple of decades making her name in London, lecturing at the British Museum, travelling in Greece and trying her hand at amateur dramatics and journalism, she returned in 1898 to her old college as its first ‘research fellow’. She became in effect the first professional, salaried female academic in the country, in the modern sense of the word ‘academic’ – a frontline activist in research and publishing, not merely a teacher, mentor and backroom helpmeet. She was the first woman in Cambridge to give lectures on university property, almost half a century before women were formally awarded degrees there; and she received honorary doctorates from the universities of Aberdeen and Durham.

Her academic fame came largely from two weighty books: Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912). In these she upturned the traditional view of ancient Greek religion as a rather staid, almost statuesque form of cult, with its flowing white robes and strumming lyres. Instead, she exposed beneath the surface a much more violent, ecstatic, even ‘primitive’ (as she saw it) religion, which – she claimed in Themis – was best understood through the lens of Durkheimian anthropology (as she signalled by the word ‘social’ in the subtitle). Many details of these arguments have not survived later scrutiny, and her enthusiasm for a decidedly unnuanced version of Durkheimian theory, to which she was a very early convert, outdid even Durkheim himself. One of Harrison’s problems was that she never knew when to stop, and she was occasionally prepared to fudge the evidence to fit her theory. That said, the old stereotype of Greek religion collapsed under her onslaught. No scholar since has been able to ignore the religion’s wild, irrational and bloody aspects. It was for academic among other reasons, no doubt, that she was sometimes nicknamed ‘Bloody Jane’.

Despite their radical claims, Prolegomena and Themis are pretty hard going. Together they make up almost 1500 pages, loaded with often obscure details and minute scraps of evidence exploited to their limit. I doubt that they ever found a large audience outside the academy or a few literary circles (T.S. Eliot and H.D. were two who fell under their influence). In the wider world, Harrison’s reputation rested on her public performances, where she stripped away the technicalities and was (as she put it herself in Reminiscences) ‘almost fatally fluent’. Flamboyantly dressed and armed with what were hailed as the most up-to-the-minute visual aids, in the form of stunning lantern slides, she drew vast crowds to her open lectures – on one occasion, so she said, attracting 1600 fans in Glasgow to a presentation on the topic of Athenian tomb sculpture. She even created something of the same atmosphere in her university lectures. ‘The hushed audience would catch the nervous tension of her bearing,’ wrote one of her academic colleagues about her teaching of classical archaeology. ‘Every lecture was a drama.’ Several years ago, some of Harrison’s slides were rediscovered, buried in a cupboard in Newnham. They didn’t quite live up to the hype, but they were exquisitely painted on glass, with key words etched onto them (almost the equivalent of a modern PowerPoint). It is hard to imagine any of the male dons going to such trouble.

Beyond these celebrity lectures, she cultivated a distinctive brand of quirky and memorable outspokenness. Reminiscences is full of anecdotes which illustrate exactly that. While still a student, for example, she stood up to William Gladstone when he came to Cambridge to visit his student daughter. He asked Harrison which her favourite Greek author was. The prudent answer would have been ‘Homer’, Gladstone’s own favourite, but – to annoy, and not wholly truthfully – she replied ‘Euripides’, then notorious for his religious scepticism. Gladstone stomped off. And years later, when she had added to her existing duties regular stints as a magistrate in the local Cambridge courts, she seems to have been blessed with an idiosyncratic leniency. On one occasion, belying the hint of xenophobia under the surface of the story of Hirohito, she let off an Armenian who was up for a fine, for no other reason (she insists) than her admiration for anyone who could speak his language, ‘the most difficult of all’ in Europe. Quite how she persuaded her fellow members of the bench to follow suit, she doesn’t say.

On this basis, I am sure, some people at the time must have dismissed her as little more than a ‘character’ or an ‘eccentric’. But Reminiscences conjures up an attractive vision of an open-minded university world, in which she could say how much she hated the British Empire (‘It stands … for all that is tedious and pernicious in thought’), could deplore patriotism (making an ironic exception only for her feelings for Yorkshire, her home county), and could happily spend college dinners discussing such questions as ‘Why do rich people always get so dull?’

Neither Cambridge nor classics, however, retained her permanently. In 1922, she decamped to Paris, and even before that – from not long after the publication of Themis – she had devoted herself to Russian instead of Greek (one of her last books was a translation of a selection of Russian folk tales). She died, back in London, in 1928. Her final appearance in Cambridge was a posthumous cameo part in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), originally given as lectures at Newnham and Girton Colleges a few months after Harrison’s death. There Woolf imagines that she caught a glimpse of the ghost of ‘J — H — herself’ – ‘a bent figure, formidable yet humble’ – walking in the gardens of what she called ‘Fernham’ College. It was Woolf’s final tribute to Harrison. Perhaps it was also an attempt to make up for Woolf’s (almost) non-appearance at Harrison’s funeral, when Virginia and Leonard arrived so late that they only ‘marched in’ (Virginia’s words) as the service was ending. Characteristically, perhaps, she blamed their lateness on the funeral’s unfashionable location in East Finchley: ‘somewhere out of the world where buses pass only one every fifteen minutes’.

The story of​ Harrison’s life usually comes across as broadly triumphalist: the woman who overcame prejudice and adversity to transform her subject, fighting back against the patriarchy (whether in the form of prime ministers, princes or professors) as much by wit as by outrage. When I myself was a student at Newnham, almost a hundred years after Harrison arrived there, we were frequently told the tales of her éclat and resilience, presumably to inject some iron into our souls. It certainly worked for me, as I began to imagine that I too might be able to face down a Gladstone or his modern equivalents. Whatever her idiosyncrasies and oddities, she was, and still is, one of my heroes.

Yet I have also increasingly come to wonder if there are other, more complicated versions of Harrison’s story, and to ask what is concealed – as much as revealed – by the standard narrative we were fed. Those who have studied Harrison’s career have often been puzzled by the private life behind her bravura public façade. In Reminiscences, she rather breezily dismisses affairs of the heart: ‘By what miracle I escaped marriage I do not know, for all my life long I fell in love. But, on the whole, I am glad. I do not doubt that I lost much, but I am quite sure I gained more.’ A lot hangs on that ‘on the whole’. We shall probably never know the costs of a series of close relationships she had that apparently, for whatever reasons, came to nothing: with R.A. Neil, a Cambridge classicist who died of appendicitis when he and Harrison might have been unofficially engaged; with D.S. MacColl, a future director of the Tate, with whom she travelled in Greece, sometimes masquerading as his wife; with the ancient philosopher Francis Cornford, who – some claimed – devastated Harrison by suddenly getting engaged to one of her ex-pupils. (Augustus John’s famous, rather swoony portrait of Harrison was painted soon after she had received the news of that marriage, and local legend has it that she sustained herself for the sitting with a bottle of whisky, hidden under the chaise longue on which she was posing.) Nor shall we ever know the nature of her relationship, towards the end of her life, with another ex-pupil, Hope Mirrlees. It was with Mirrlees that she moved to Paris in 1922, and with Mirrlees as joint author that she published her book of Russian folk tales. They were very close, but were they lovers? Perhaps. Virginia Woolf certainly assumed so, referring to them living together in a ‘Sapphic flat somewhere’. But, whether Woolf is a reliable guide or not (she would assume that, wouldn’t she?), simply to decide that Harrison was gay doesn’t in itself answer many of the big questions.

More to the point is how she navigated the academic world of early 20th-century Cambridge, in which women had such a tenuous position. Women’s colleges weren’t formally part of the university; women students could take university exams but, in the worst of both worlds, they did not actually receive a degree if they passed; and a woman, such as Harrison, who lectured on university property did so strictly by invitation only. The impression we usually get is that, while overt discrimination of course hovered in the background, it did not undermine the tolerant university world in which Harrison – with her sparky wit and refusal to be silenced – operated so memorably, albeit from the margins. That is the message of so many of the anecdotes in which she stars. But I am not so sure.

The margins are, for better and worse, a complicated place to inhabit. It is a fair guess that Harrison’s marginality helped enable her radical approach to ancient Greek culture. She herself, in a lecture of 1913, spoke (rather too fulsomely for my taste) about the ‘good fortune’ she had had all her life ‘to work with men in my own subject … perhaps the best and pleasantest, the purest pleasure life has to offer’. But, notwithstanding, it was the simple fact that she did not have to play by the academic rules of the classical establishment (overwhelmingly then a ‘boys’ club’) that made it easier for her to disrupt the old certainties and stereotypes – and to invest in Durkheim and a smattering of Mother Goddesses as well as in Thucydides and the stately Olympian deities. At the same time, however, it is hard to imagine that she was as unaffected as she might appear by the day-to-day hierarchies and microaggressions of a university to which she didn’t ever fully belong. These can be far harder to stomach than the formal exclusions from degrees, academic titles and university jobs.

That was partly Woolf’s point when, in A Room of One’s Own, she compared the character of the food (prunes and custard) at ‘Fernham’ to the far more lavish fare in men’s colleges. But it was worse than mere differences of menu. One of the most chilling pieces of trivia preserved in the Newnham archive is a copy of a note written to the university librarian by a senior classicist (the otherwise very liberal Henry Jackson) pointing out that he had spotted ‘Miss Harrison’ with a library book in her possession. As women were not allowed to enter, let alone borrow from, the library, he concluded that some male friend must have illicitly borrowed it on her behalf and that an investigation should ensue. Such casual surveillance and such officious, sneaky betrayal seem almost worse than the exclusion in the first place. It is hard to imagine that such behaviour could always be shrugged off, or dismissed with another round of spiky repartee.

But​ the biggest question is how the standard narrative of Harrison’s life has come down to us. We do catch a few glimpses of alternative and less favourable versions of the story, and not only from disgruntled representatives of the patriarchy. The surviving minutes of some Newnham College committees at the time make it clear that Harrison’s academic success sometimes came at the cost of exploiting her less pioneering and less glamorous female colleagues. If her research in Greece was going well, she was quite capable of staying abroad for the beginning of term and expecting others to stand in for her. It’s easy to guess what those long-suffering foot soldiers would have thought of the superstar in their midst. And, though her showy public lectures could be crowd-pullers, some of her friends found them insufferable. ‘A trifle overdone’ was to put it mildly: they could seem anything from ‘patronising’ (‘sufficient is it for you to know’ was apparently one of her favourite lines) to embarrassingly sensationalist. You loved them or you hated them.

The problem is that few of these alternative perspectives survive. In fact, the primary materials for Harrison’s life are relatively scant. That is largely because, before she left for Paris, she is supposed to have burned all her papers. (No one ever does quite that, but Harrison clearly made a good go of it.) What is preserved in ‘her’ archive at Newnham is dominated by the research notes for two biographies by ex-students, left unfinished in part because publishers weren’t very interested in them (Harrison tumbled from fashion soon after her death). The first of these was by Mirrlees. To judge from the jottings, it would have been an extravagant hagiography: ‘Jane’s conduct was always magnificent,’ one draft sentence ran, without any apparent trace of irony. (She did, however, record some of the adverse verdicts on Harrison’s lecturing style.) The rival version, by Jesse Stewart, was finally published thirty years after Harrison’s death, but in a truncated form, as an edition of her letters to Gilbert Murray, professor of Greek at Oxford. It was only while this edition was being prepared that Murray realised his letters to her had gone onto the bonfire.

The fact is that the standard narrative of Harrison’s life comes directly from Harrison herself. The key text is Reminiscences of a Student’s Life, first published as a very slim volume of fewer than a hundred pages in 1925, by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. Most of what we now think we know of Harrison is reported, or partly constructed, by her as a loaded retrospective in the last few years of her life. I still recall my surprise years ago on realising that all my favourite Harrison anecdotes were her stories, told, retold and no doubt burnished in Reminiscences.

It is a tremendous read and a masterclass in carefully crafted self-deprecation as one of the most effective ways of boasting. Harrison comes across as an outsider who always offered a refreshing challenge to the insiders (the ‘Gladstone treatment’ is rolled out more than once); as someone who didn’t take herself entirely seriously (quite how silly was it to faint when George Eliot admired her specially chosen wallpaper?); and someone who was always on the side of the young. ‘We old people,’ she wrote, ‘must steadily face the fact that the young are more likely to be right than the old.’ And the title itself carries the message that Harrison herself had (happily) never quite grown up, while she revels in that licence to puncture received wisdom and take a few pot shots at the great and the good. ‘The Matterhorn,’ she writes, ‘is one of the ugliest objects in all nature … a colossal extracted fang turned upside down.’ On a weekend visit to stay with Tennyson (‘the most openly vain man I have ever met’), she finds his whole house ‘so charged with an atmosphere of hero-worship that free breathing was difficult’. Dinner with Samuel Butler in Athens, meanwhile, is spoiled when Harrison discovers that she is only being used as a ‘safety valve’ so that he can drone on about his theory that the Odyssey was written by a woman. She doesn’t try very hard to conceal the privilege in all this (not everyone got invited to weekends chez Tennyson or showed up at the same Greek hotel as Butler). But there’s just enough of the wide-eyed, plain-speaking girl from Yorkshire on display to make sure that you appreciate her triumphs. You can’t help being on the same side as the Jane Harrison of the Reminiscences.

That, of course, is exactly why it was written. Like many autobiographies, Reminiscences was intended to help Harrison control her own reputation, to create the voice that she wanted to be heard. And she remains my hero, not because I think I would have particularly warmed to her in the flesh (I suspect I would have been among those who found the histrionic lecturing hard to take). Nor because I entirely believe the way she wrote herself up. It is more because she was so sharply aware of the stories women needed to be told about succeeding as a woman; and she was brilliant at telling them. She has remained the iron in my soul.