Alpha and Omega

by Jane Ellen Harrison, Maria Popova (foreword)

Alpha and Omega is the culminating work of Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick Cambridge classicist who reshaped our understanding of ancient Greek culture and pioneered a radical vision of faith, imagination, and progress. Declaring herself a “deeply religious atheist,” Harrison rejected the confines of dogma to explore faith as the human capacity to transcend the known and imagine the possible. This collection of essays—published at the dawn of World War I—unpacks the invisible connections between science and spirituality, individual belief and collective consciousness, and reason and love as forces for societal transformation. With wit and daring, Harrison dismantles the binaries that divide us—young and old, feminine and masculine, sacred and profane—revealing how these tensions, when reconciled, can catalyze change.

As Maria Popova writes in her introduction, Harrison’s essays are an “act of faith toward the future and an act of heresy toward the status quo,” challenging us to rethink our biases, beliefs, and most deeply held assumptions. From the influence of Darwinism on religion to the psychology of conversion, from the evolution of gender roles to the ethics of pacifism, Alpha and Omega is a timeless guide to the imagination and courage required to live through an age of division and uncertainty.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

Published September 9, 2025

About the author

Jane Ellen Harrison (9 September 1850 – 15 April 1928) was a British classical scholar and linguist. Harrison is one of the founders, with Karl Kerenyi and Walter Burkert, 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 her death in 1903.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_El...

Reviews

[Tim Regan]

I've not read this (yet) but it forms the centrepiece of one of Maria Popova's excellent Marginalian Newsletter editions: https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/0...

[Tessa {bleeds glitter} · Rating 2 out of 5]

It has made of religion a moral obligation, a thing you can seek to impose. We can and must impose morality, because morality is just the system of give and take which is the condition of our living together. But we proceed to make our human gods into incarnate patterns of morality (…), and then in the name of morality we seek to impose those imagined humanities onto our neighbors.

We are humane so far as we are conscious or sensitive to individual life.

It is not so much the breaking with old faith that makes us restless as the living in a new social structure.

You may delay a reform till the exacerbation caused by your delay is worse than the original evil.

I would not recommend reading this book in English if that's not your first language and you also have a bad cold and are therefore barely able to use your brain. It was a struggle.
I debated not rating this book at all, because of the above mentioned issues that aren't the book's fault. However: Working through this took a lot out of me, it pissed me off and I seriously doubt Harrison cares.
First and foremost: You need a lot of knowledge about the current history of when this was first published (or maybe even when the individual essays were written) to understand anything of what's going on. A few paragraphs of exposition or explanation surely wouldn't have hurt, if you're going to reprint an edition.
Harrison's writing isn't easily understandable (again, above-mentioned issues may have come to play here), these are purely academical texts and the nearly endless meandering around the point Harrison tries to make really burnt through all the very limited energy I had to offer this book. I get that we all have horrible attention spans, but I love reading. I keep remembering how much I love sitting down with a physical book and working my way through it. I also like to think I'm not entirely stupid and rarely struggle with the vocabulary in more conventional non-fiction books, but for this I had to reach for my phone and look up words way too often. Yes, these are old essays, I get that they used different vocabulary, it's fine. What isn't fine is that most of the essays could have been a two paragraph email and yet they're dragged out until I couldn't even remember what Harrison had set out to prove in that essay. If you told me that every politician has to read these essays to learn how to never actually say anything while boring their audience to death, I would believe you. Not much of what the foreword or the summary promised me concerning Harrison's stand on religion, feminism or even war was delivered. Maybe it was and I just didn't get it, but it really feels like Harrison never actually says anything. It's all buried beneath pages and pages or clever words and foreign language.
Which is my next, humongous issue: Foreign language. Why is nothing translated? It's amazing that everyone in the early twentieth century was fluent in French, Latin and German, I'm not. Just like I wasn't alive back then and so have no idea about the context of many of these essays. I don't want to pick up my phone and translate a sentence or word almost every paragraph, definitely every second. That is exhausting and frustrating (also, what exactly have I payed the publisher for?).
What it all boils down to: This is why I dropped out of university. The payoff for wading through endless, meandering highbrow rhetoric about what certain words can be interpreted to mean if you ignore what everyone else means by using them is truly minimal.

[Sarah Jensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book Review: Alpha and Omega by Jane Ellen Harrison (Foreword by Maria Popova)

A Radical Reimagining of Faith and Progress
Jane Ellen Harrison’s Alpha and Omega is a revelatory collection that defies disciplinary boundaries, blending classical scholarship, psychology, and theology into a visionary critique of dogma. As a reader immersed in intellectual history, I found Harrison’s essays electrifying in their audacity—her self-described “deeply religious atheism” dismantles binaries (sacred/profane, reason/emotion) with a precision that feels urgently contemporary. Maria Popova’s foreword aptly frames the work as both heresy and prophecy, a duality that resonates throughout Harrison’s interrogation of Darwinism’s impact on religion and the ethics of pacifism.

Scholarly Significance & Emotional Impact
Harrison’s prose—alternately witty and wrenching—transforms abstract debates into visceral reckonings. Her essay on the psychology of conversion provoked an unexpected emotional response; her analysis of how fear distorts belief mirrored modern discourses on polarization. The chapter reconciling “feminine” intuition with “masculine” logic (terms she deconstructs) left me reflecting for days on how academia still grapples with these artificial divides. Harrison’s courage to critique Cambridge’s patriarchal structures—a rarity for a woman in 1915—lends moral weight to her arguments.

Constructive Criticism

-Structural Density: Some essays assume fluency in classical references and 19th-century scientific debates; contextual footnotes would aid interdisciplinary readers.
-Temporal Disjuncture: While timeless in themes, a few passages (e.g., pre-Freudian gender analysis) require historical framing to avoid misinterpretation.
-Narrative Arc: The collection’s thematic breadth occasionally sacrifices cohesion; a concluding synthesis could strengthen its pedagogical utility.

Enduring Relevance
What makes Alpha and Omega extraordinary is its refusal to compartmentalize. Harrison’s fusion of mythography and social critique anticipates contemporary movements to decolonize knowledge. Her call to “imagine the possible” amid uncertainty feels tailor-made for today’s crises—climate collapse, authoritarianism—demanding the same intellectual bravery she embodied.

Acknowledgments
Thank you to the publisher and Edelweiss for the gifted review copy. This Marginalian Edition revitalizes a seminal but oft-overlooked work, making it essential reading for scholars of religion, gender studies, and the history of science.

Rating: 4.8/5 (A masterwork of heterodox thought—would benefit from light scholarly apparatus to widen accessibility.)

[Ajda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Last book of the year, finished in the airport at 9pm in the airport headed to Nashville. Read the newly published version from McNally Editions under the oversight of the Marginalian Editions (aka Maria Popova <3). Excited to read each from the series. This work surprised me -- the way it was written, and the certain details that felt old and the certain details that felt ominously present. It's nice (and horrific) to know someone had all the same issues as we still do in our present day. Excited to re-read. I want to teach it to my students.