Jane Ellen Harrison
Also known as Jane Harrison, J. E. Harrison
British classical scholar, linguist and feminist (1850–1928)
Person · Open Library
- Born
- 1850
- Died
- 1928
- Works
- 45
via Open Library + Wikidata
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Jane Ellen Harrison (9 September 1850 – 15 April 1928) was a British classical scholar, linguist and feminist. Harrison is one of the founders, with Karl Kerenyi and Walter Burkert, of modern studies in Greek mythology. She applied 19th century archaeological discoveries to the interpretation of Greek religion in ways that have become standard. Contemporary classics scholar Mary Beard, Harrison's biographer, has described her as "in a way ... [Britain's] first female professional 'career academi
Works in European collections
6 objects attributed to Jane Ellen Harrison, held across European museums, libraries & archives · via Europeana
~13 min read
Article
Jane Ellen Harrison (9 September 1850 – 15 April 1928) was a British classical scholar and linguist. With Karl Kerenyi and Walter Burkert, Harrison is one of the founders of modern studies in Ancient Greek religion and mythology. She applied 19th-century archaeological discoveries to the interpretation of ancient Greek religion in ways that have become standard. She has also been credited with being the first woman to obtain a post in England as a 'career academic'. Harrison argued for women's suffrage but thought she would never want to vote herself. Ellen Wordsworth Crofts, later second wife of Sir Francis Darwin, was Jane Harrison's best friend from her student days at Newnham, and during the period from 1898 to Ellen's death in 1903. The depth and influence of Harrison’s friendship with Eugénie Sellers Strong—ended by a dramatic breach in the 1890s—is explored in a monograph by Mary Beard: after their breakup Sellers became an influential authority on the material culture of Imperial Rome, while Harrison’s work dug deeper and deeper into the primitive ritual origins of Greek drama. Though moving in different directions chronologically, in terms of their focus, the women appear otherwise as doppelgängers of one another in their concerns, style and characteristic forms of argument deriving from an approach that became known as classical anthropology. Harrison’s Prolegomena to Greek Religion had a compelling and inspirational impact on the later work of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Hilda Doolittle and her scholarly legerdemain was formative to the group of classicists known as the Cambridge ritualists.
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1850 births1928 deaths19th-century atheists19th-century British essayists19th-century British linguists19th-century British women scientists19th-century British women writers19th-century English LGBTQ people19th-century English non-fiction writers20th-century atheists20th-century British essayists20th-century British linguists