Harrison, Orphism and Cambridge

Reviews  HARRISON, ORPHISM AND CAMBRIDGE W B Educational Studies / U. of British Columbia Vancouver, , Canada   .@. Annabel Robinson. The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison. Oxford: Oxford U.P., . Pp. xvi, . £.; .. nnabel Robinson thinks Jane Harrison (–) “deserves to be better Aknown than she is” (p. ). Robinson’s biography, well-argued and highly readable, may begin to remedy that historical injustice. Classicists will eagerly scan Robinson’s discussion of a scholar whose views on Greek religion and civilization still produce controversy. On another hand, enthusiasts of literary and social Bloomsbury will find much to occupy them, as the volume is speckled with sub-narratives of Harrison’s friendships with Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, and Lytton Strachey (whose sister Pernel also taught and administered at Cambridge University’s Newnham College and was Fellow and later Principal, –).  Suzara does include “A Complete List of Bertrand Russell’s Books”, but it is not as complete as Suzara thinks. Indeed, on page  of the text Suzara cites a Russell anthology not included in his list at the end. Suzara also provides a brief and highly selective list of books about Russell, marred most conspicuously by the claim that Katharine Tait’s My Father Bertrand Russell was edited by Ralph Schoenman (p. ).  Reviews As for the university (and women in it), historians of Cambridge will find in Robinson’s work an accessible sketch of a women’s college (Newnham) in its early days, and a convenient review of the controversy over examinations and degrees for women. Indirectly, Robinson tells a good deal about the larger debate in early twentieth-century Cambridge over academic standards, quality, and assessment, a debate stimulated in large part by women’s participation in a male-dominated institution. The book is roughly chronological, taking Harrison from an emotionally difficult childhood in a well-to-do Yorkshire businessman’s home, through secondary schooling in the Cheltenham Ladies’ College, to Newnham as student (–), and London, where Harrison lived on her £ per annum private income. To this she added fees from lectures to colleges, societies, and museums. By the s, she was publishing books and articles based on her close acquaintance with art and archaeological remains in the British Museum, and after , knowledge of Greece acquired on visits there. By , her intellectual modus operandi was well established. Fascinated always by “the newest discoveries and theories” (Robinson, p. ), Harrison tried to find the original folk-ways, the fundamental psychology, and the social practices that shaped the very earliest Greek religion, what she called “the links in the chain from primitive demons and spirits to the gods of Olympus” (ibid.). Harrison’s work should be understood, along with that of Henry Butcher, Gilbert Murray, A. W. Verrall, and a whole galaxy of German researchers, as a determined attack on an older view: that the Homeric vision of the gods provided a complete account of Greek religion, and that literary sources were sufficient grounds for theory-making in the field. Harrison may have gone too far, too fast in the other direction, sometimes erecting uncertain, and even unbelievable theories on the basis of partial archaeological and anthropological evidence. Still, she was a courageous academic innovator. Harrison “read her own experience into Greek literature” (p. ). Her own religious views are an example of that reading. She was probably an agnostic in her early s, but her work on Greek religion gave Harrison a thorough basis for informed, sympathetic agnosticism about formal religious systems and practices. Her disappointments with men are another example of the larger point, as those experiences led her to project a certain melancholy onto Homer, Pindar, Euripides, and so on. Even her commitment to feminist action, to peaceable  For a convenient and thorough listing of Harrison’s works, see Klaus-Gunther Wesseling’s entry for “Jane Ellen Harrison” in the Biographisch-bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (Nordhausen: Verlag Traugott Bautz, ), : cols. –; and by the same author, loc. cit., : cols. –, “Gilbert Murray”. See also Helmut Linneweber-Lammerskitten, “Bertrand Russell”, loc. cit. [], : cols. –. See the work’s website at: http://www.bautz.de/bbkl/ (consulted  April ). Reviews  political reform, and to sustained criticism of culture and politics in VictorianEdwardian England, all owed something to her...

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