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Revealing Antiquity
The Invention of Jane Harrison
Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) is the most famous female Classicist in history, the author of books that revolutionized our understanding of Greek culture and religion. A star in the British academic world, she became the quintessential Cambridge woman--as Virginia Woolf suggested when, in A Room of One's Own , she claims to have glimpsed Harrison's ghost in the college gardens. This lively and innovative portrayal of a fascinating woman raises the question of who wins (and how) in the competition for academic fame. Mary Beard captures Harrison's ability to create her own image. And she contrasts her story with that of Eugénie Sellers Strong, a younger contemporary and onetime intimate, the author of major work on Roman art and once a glittering figure at the British School in Rome--but who lost the race for renown. The setting for the story of Harrison's career is Classical scholarship in this period--its internal arguments and allegiances and especially the influence of the anthropological strain most strikingly exemplified by Sir James Frazer. Questioning the common criteria for identifying intellectual "influence" and "movements," Beard exposes the mythology that is embedded in the history of Classics. At the same time she provides a vivid picture of a sparkling intellectual scene. The Invention of Jane Harrison offers shrewd history and undiluted fun.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
2 people are currently reading
234 people want to read
About the author
Mary Beard
65 books4,189 followersWinifred Mary Beard (born 1 January 1955) is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge and is a fellow of Newnham College. She is the Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and author of the blog "A Don's Life", which appears on The Times as a regular column. Her frequent media appearances and sometimes controversial public statements have led to her being described as "Britain's best-known classicist".
Mary Beard, an only child, was born on 1 January 1955 in Much Wenlock, Shropshire. Her father, Roy Whitbread Beard, worked as an architect in Shrewsbury. She recalled him as "a raffish public-schoolboy type and a complete wastrel, but very engaging". Her mother Joyce Emily Beard was a headmistress and an enthusiastic reader.
Mary Beard attended an all-female direct grant school. During the summer she participated in archaeological excavations; this was initially to earn money for recreational spending, but she began to find the study of antiquity unexpectedly interesting. But it was not all that interested the young Beard. She had friends in many age groups, and a number of trangressions: "Playing around with other people's husbands when you were 17 was bad news. Yes, I was a very naughty girl."
At the age of 18 she was interviewed for a place at Newnham College, Cambridge and sat the then compulsory entrance exam. She had thought of going to King's, but rejected it when she discovered the college did not offer scholarships to women. Although studying at a single-sex college, she found in her first year that some men in the University held dismissive attitudes towards women's academic potential, and this strengthened her determination to succeed. She also developed feminist views that remained "hugely important" in her later life, although she later described "modern orthodox feminism" as partly "cant". Beard received an MA at Newnham and remained in Cambridge for her PhD.
From 1979 to 1983 she lectured in Classics at King's College London. She returned to Cambridge in 1984 as a fellow of Newnham College and the only female lecturer in the Classics faculty. Rome in the Late Republic, which she co-wrote with the Cambridge ancient historian Michael Crawford, was published the same year. In 1985 Beard married Robin Sinclair Cormack. She had a daughter in 1985 and a son in 1987. Beard became Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement in 1992.
Shortly after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, Beard was one of several authors invited to contribute articles on the topic to the London Review of Books. She opined that many people, once "the shock had faded", thought "the United States had it coming", and that "[w]orld bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price".[4] In a November 2007 interview, she stated that the hostility these comments provoked had still not subsided, although she believed it had become a standard viewpoint that terrorism was associated with American foreign policy.[1]
In 2004, Beard became the Professor of Classics at Cambridge.[3] She is also the Visiting Sather Professor of Classical Literature for 2008–2009 at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has delivered a series of lectures on "Roman Laughter".[5]
Mary Beard, an only child, was born on 1 January 1955 in Much Wenlock, Shropshire. Her father, Roy Whitbread Beard, worked as an architect in Shrewsbury. She recalled him as "a raffish public-schoolboy type and a complete wastrel, but very engaging". Her mother Joyce Emily Beard was a headmistress and an enthusiastic reader.
Mary Beard attended an all-female direct grant school. During the summer she participated in archaeological excavations; this was initially to earn money for recreational spending, but she began to find the study of antiquity unexpectedly interesting. But it was not all that interested the young Beard. She had friends in many age groups, and a number of trangressions: "Playing around with other people's husbands when you were 17 was bad news. Yes, I was a very naughty girl."
At the age of 18 she was interviewed for a place at Newnham College, Cambridge and sat the then compulsory entrance exam. She had thought of going to King's, but rejected it when she discovered the college did not offer scholarships to women. Although studying at a single-sex college, she found in her first year that some men in the University held dismissive attitudes towards women's academic potential, and this strengthened her determination to succeed. She also developed feminist views that remained "hugely important" in her later life, although she later described "modern orthodox feminism" as partly "cant". Beard received an MA at Newnham and remained in Cambridge for her PhD.
From 1979 to 1983 she lectured in Classics at King's College London. She returned to Cambridge in 1984 as a fellow of Newnham College and the only female lecturer in the Classics faculty. Rome in the Late Republic, which she co-wrote with the Cambridge ancient historian Michael Crawford, was published the same year. In 1985 Beard married Robin Sinclair Cormack. She had a daughter in 1985 and a son in 1987. Beard became Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement in 1992.
Shortly after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, Beard was one of several authors invited to contribute articles on the topic to the London Review of Books. She opined that many people, once "the shock had faded", thought "the United States had it coming", and that "[w]orld bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price".[4] In a November 2007 interview, she stated that the hostility these comments provoked had still not subsided, although she believed it had become a standard viewpoint that terrorism was associated with American foreign policy.[1]
In 2004, Beard became the Professor of Classics at Cambridge.[3] She is also the Visiting Sather Professor of Classical Literature for 2008–2009 at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has delivered a series of lectures on "Roman Laughter".[5]
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 25, 2018
The renowned--and controversial--classicist Jane Harrison (1850-1928) never received the full biographical study she deserved. In her contribution to the Harvard series, Revealing Antiquity, renowned and controversial classicist Mary Beard tells us why.
Harrison's unconventional scholarship and her flamboyant public lectures have less to do with the neglect than her unconventional lifestyle. Harrison herself worked hard to fashion a persona during her lifetime, presenting herself as an iconoclast in the field of Classical Studies, the first to exploit the connection between dark religious rituals, art, and mythology in reconstructing the culture of Greek antiquity. Harrison was a brilliant scholar, an original thinker and a successful popularizer of new theories and approaches to understanding the world of the ancient Greeks. Beard calls her "a permanent fixture in the history of scholarship.
Harrison complicated the biographer's job by destroying her letters (that is, the letters she received from friends, fellow scholars, and other correspondents). Following her death, her closest companion, Hope Mirlles, the younger woman--a former student--with whom she spent the final two decades of her life, attempted to control access to Harrison's papers at Newnham College, Cambridge, perhaps fearing that her reputation would be harmed, were she outed as a lesbian. Beard lays out the evidence for Harrison's lesbianism without weighing in definitively. Virginia Woolf may have described Harrison and Mirllees as a "sapphic pair," but whether the obvious intimacy between the two women entailed a sexual dimension remains in the realm of speculation, and Beard refuses to go further.
Personally, I would have liked to learn more about Harrison's ideas. The Revealing Antiquity series is presented as accessible intellectual history. This is my thing, what I was trained in, what I taught, what I do in my nonfiction writing (and in my historical mystery series too). Beard describes Harrison's importance. Intriguingly, she writes, "in the very male intellectual world of a century ago, [Harrison] put women academics and women's colleges (dangerously) on the map." That choice of word, dangerously is never explained, but had more to do with Harrison's scholarship than with her lifestyle.
Beard does acknowledge that others, such as E. R. Dodds, developed the dark and dangerous side of Greek culture more "sharply, economically, and accurately." I will be reading and reviewing The Greeks and the Irrational next.
Harrison's unconventional scholarship and her flamboyant public lectures have less to do with the neglect than her unconventional lifestyle. Harrison herself worked hard to fashion a persona during her lifetime, presenting herself as an iconoclast in the field of Classical Studies, the first to exploit the connection between dark religious rituals, art, and mythology in reconstructing the culture of Greek antiquity. Harrison was a brilliant scholar, an original thinker and a successful popularizer of new theories and approaches to understanding the world of the ancient Greeks. Beard calls her "a permanent fixture in the history of scholarship.
So crucial is she to our own understanding of why we think (about Greek culture and religion) as we do that it is hard to believe quite how dispensable she seemed in the decades that followed her death . . . The scorn for Harrison in the 1940s and 1950s, the faint praise that damned any interest in her as touching (but misplaced) loyalty, now seems little short of ludicrous.Had Harrison been a man, her career would have looked very different. Very likely she would have gotten a prestigious academic chair and not been forced to support herself through private lessons and public lectures, and her relations with her colleagues might have been easier. There appears to have been a good deal of defensiveness in Harrison's self-mythologizing, but who can blame her for downplaying what she owed to the field of Classical Archaeology in Britain, given the misogyny of late-Victorian England and the resentment of her male academic colleagues? Certainly not Beard, who has contended with enough misogyny and resentment in British society at large and in the academic world to recognize what her predecessor was up against.
Harrison complicated the biographer's job by destroying her letters (that is, the letters she received from friends, fellow scholars, and other correspondents). Following her death, her closest companion, Hope Mirlles, the younger woman--a former student--with whom she spent the final two decades of her life, attempted to control access to Harrison's papers at Newnham College, Cambridge, perhaps fearing that her reputation would be harmed, were she outed as a lesbian. Beard lays out the evidence for Harrison's lesbianism without weighing in definitively. Virginia Woolf may have described Harrison and Mirllees as a "sapphic pair," but whether the obvious intimacy between the two women entailed a sexual dimension remains in the realm of speculation, and Beard refuses to go further.
Personally, I would have liked to learn more about Harrison's ideas. The Revealing Antiquity series is presented as accessible intellectual history. This is my thing, what I was trained in, what I taught, what I do in my nonfiction writing (and in my historical mystery series too). Beard describes Harrison's importance. Intriguingly, she writes, "in the very male intellectual world of a century ago, [Harrison] put women academics and women's colleges (dangerously) on the map." That choice of word, dangerously is never explained, but had more to do with Harrison's scholarship than with her lifestyle.
Beard does acknowledge that others, such as E. R. Dodds, developed the dark and dangerous side of Greek culture more "sharply, economically, and accurately." I will be reading and reviewing The Greeks and the Irrational next.
January 31, 2025
3.5
the more a historian tries to say there isn’t enough evidence to prove someone was queer the more i believe they were
the more a historian tries to say there isn’t enough evidence to prove someone was queer the more i believe they were
June 11, 2025
I really wanted to like this but sadly didn't anywhere near as much as I had hoped. I didn't know of Jane Harrison before reading it and I don't feel much the wiser now. The text went around in circles a lot - in time, and in theme, an in focussing on other women in Miss Harrison's life.
If I had been able to read a physical copy of the book it might have made the previous issues less of a challenge, as a big problem for me was the narrator of the audiobook. She used a sing-song tone which seemed to indicate a lack of understanding of what she was reading. Plus there were pronunciation issues, the most glaring of which was that a debate about how the remains of a particular site should be understood, described as the 'theatre row', was said with row as in 'row your boat', when it should have been a row (ie an argument) to rhyme with 'how, now, brown cow'.
If I had been able to read a physical copy of the book it might have made the previous issues less of a challenge, as a big problem for me was the narrator of the audiobook. She used a sing-song tone which seemed to indicate a lack of understanding of what she was reading. Plus there were pronunciation issues, the most glaring of which was that a debate about how the remains of a particular site should be understood, described as the 'theatre row', was said with row as in 'row your boat', when it should have been a row (ie an argument) to rhyme with 'how, now, brown cow'.
October 3, 2021
With wit, humour and forthrightness, Beard’s study of Jane Harrison’s posthumous reputation, especially as it contrasts with that of Harrison's friend and contemporary Eugenie Strong, is a fascinating study of the construction of the biographical and autobiographical subject. Along the way she discusses the nature of intimate relationships between women and the competing definitions of them by the women themselves (if indeed these are discoverable) and by later commentators; the creation and authority of archives; and biographical rivalries and competing claims to authority. Big themes, but wrapped up in gossipy stories of squabbles, relationships, rivalry and mysteries (why did Harrison and Strong fall out?), they make for a gripping read.
February 12, 2025
Before I read the book, I had no idea who Jane Harrison was.
Now that I have read the book, I still have no idea. Something about a classicist for Roman History.
A third of the book was just about a potential feud with a classicist for Greek History that might have been there because they ignored each other.
Then another chunk is about biographers bickering about the correct narrative and in the end the final conclusion that you can't really say what she was and wasn't since there are so many perspectives.
This is a book about trivialities. So insignificant that it is almost a philosophical exercise in meaning as the most interesting thing about this is that some people seem to able to care.
Now that I have read the book, I still have no idea. Something about a classicist for Roman History.
A third of the book was just about a potential feud with a classicist for Greek History that might have been there because they ignored each other.
Then another chunk is about biographers bickering about the correct narrative and in the end the final conclusion that you can't really say what she was and wasn't since there are so many perspectives.
This is a book about trivialities. So insignificant that it is almost a philosophical exercise in meaning as the most interesting thing about this is that some people seem to able to care.
October 8, 2023
Looking for another Mary Beard book recommended by a friend,I discovered this, which I have in my real book library but had not gotten around to reading. Was thoroughly delighted by her archival explorations and judicious analysis of the construction of various biographical myths about Harrison.
December 30, 2023
It wasn't was I was looking for, a biography of Harrison, but rather the discussion of the same. And even though it was very well done and interesting in its own, I still feel like I ought to have read a normal biography first before reading this one.
March 16, 2024
this was unfortunately not very friendly to someone who doesnt have an encyclopedic knowledge of jane harrison, so my main take-away is that all the main female classicists of that era were probably Gay For Each Other and Gay Together. and to that i say Good For Them
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September 22, 2024I'm so illiterate in classics not sure why I thought I could read a book like this. Why is it so hard to read books on antiquity and its scholars? I immediately feel so out of my depth almost every time. I think I mainly got what I got out of this book from the introduction.
July 13, 2018
Not really very interesting, I’m sorry to say. I kept wondering what the fuss was about.
August 3, 2014
When did putting out half an idea become not only acceptable scholarship but academically fashionable? Beard writes like an angel (if a little too self-consciously clever) and has some good ideas. But her research is only half-done and she never goes far beyond the criticism of other academics. What is good: she shows how much Harrison was engaged with Greek art and she shows us too how the study of Greek art was bound up in the emergence of Classical Archaeology. And all of this works (well) to question the value of identifying Harrison as the key member of the 'Cambridge Ritualists' (a title that the group in question never adopted). But... there can be no doubt that Harrison and others did form some kind of group deeply interested in the origins of Greek religion and culture (and with some distinctly strange ideas about it). The lazy side of the book is that - for all the Young Turk bravado and show of original research - the research is actually quite limited and therefore so too is the reconstruction of Harrison's context. At the end of the day, Beard has not properly set Harrison against the intellectual context of Edwardian Cambridge - there is still much work to be done.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews